I have an Ubuntu 20.04 server (a local VM in my case). How do I mount a directory on the Linux server from a macOS Catalina client, using NFS?
I'm using ssmtp, and I would like to not make my /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf world-readable, because it has my gateway password in cleartext. But if it is mode 600, then ssmtp run as an unprivileged user errors out with "ssmtp: Cannot open mailhub:25", because it cannot read the config file.
This article recommend creating a special ssmtp user and making it SUID, but before I add that kind of complexity to my deployment script, I want to ask:
Is it safe (barring security holes in ssmtp) to just make the ssmtp binary SUID root, so it can read the config file?
(I'm aware of the dangers of SUID in general -- no general answers please! My question is about ssmtp in particular, because I'm wondering if it has been written with being safe for SUID-root in mind.)
Update: Filed as bug #812423 on Launchpad.
I have mysqld pointed to an external volume:
$ cat /etc/mysql/conf.d/data_joliss.cnf
[mysqld]
datadir=/mnt/data_joliss/mysql
This is working fine in general. But sometimes the volume is not mounted, for whatever reason. In those cases, mysqld fails like it should:
# mysqld
110716 14:17:42 [Warning] Can't create test file /mnt/data_joliss/mysql/opinionated-programmer.lower-test
110716 14:17:42 [Warning] Can't create test file /mnt/data_joliss/mysql/opinionated-programmer.lower-test
mysqld: Can't change dir to '/mnt/data_joliss/mysql/' (Errcode: 2)
110716 14:17:42 [ERROR] Aborting
110716 14:17:42 [Note] mysqld: Shutdown complete
However, the upstart job on Ubuntu 11.04 (start mysql or service start mysql) simply waits (hangs) indefinitely without outputting anything. The strace isn't telling me anything, but if anybody cares to take a look: strace -fv start mysql
I would like the mysql upstart job to just report an error and terminate rather than hanging. How do I do this?
(Background: I have an EC2 instance with an extra EBS volume to store permanent data. If the EBS volume is not available at boot time, the system hangs waiting for mysql, and I cannot even SSH into it to fix the problem -- so now my instance has become completely unusable. I would like it to just continue booting, even without a MySQL server.)
Are there any conventions on where to put swap files on Linux?
I usually just create them in /var/swapfile, but that seems a bit too high up in the hierarchy.