Since upgrading my mail server from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8, I've come across some problems with the sockets used for communication between sendmail and two of the "milter" plugins I'm using with it, namely milter-regex and spamass-milter. It's very likely that other milters will have similar issues.
The sockets used are created when the milter starts, as follows:
milter-regex: /var/spool/milter-regex/sock (var_spool_t, inherited from parent directory)
spamass-milter: /var/run/spamass-milter/spamass-milter.sock (spamd_var_run_t, in policy)
These are pretty well the upstream locations, though I'm open to moving the milter-regex socket from /var/spool to /var/run or elsewhere for consistency.
Since moving to Fedora 8, I've had to add the following to local policy to get these milters working:
allow sendmail_t spamd_var_run_t:dir { search getattr }; allow sendmail_t spamd_var_run_t:sock_file { getattr write }; allow sendmail_t var_spool_t:sock_file { getattr write }; allow sendmail_t initrc_t:unix_stream_socket { read write connectto };
The last of these is the strangest, and relates to Bug #425958 (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=425958). Whilst the socket file itself has the context listed above, the unix domain socket that sendmail connects to is still initrc_t, as can be seen from the output of "netstat -lpZ":
... unix 2 [ ACC ] STREAM LISTENING 14142 5853/spamass-milter system_u:system_r:initrc_t:s0 /var/run/spamass-milter/spamass-milter.sock unix 2 [ ACC ] STREAM LISTENING 13794 5779/milter-regex system_u:system_r:initrc_t:s0 /var/spool/milter-regex/sock ...
So, my questions are:
1. Why are the sockets still initrc_t? 2. Is this a kernel issue or a userspace issue that should be fixed in the milters? 3. Should there be a standard place for milter sockets to live, and if so, where? 4. How come this worked OK in Fedora 7 and previous releases?
Paul.