Subject: Pine Attach w/ WU-FTP

From: "Sheryl A. Lemma" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 04 Sep 1998 12:50:33 -0400

Hi all,

Since many of you invested time into this problem (thank you!), I thought
you'd all be interested in the solution.

Just as a recap, we installed wu-ftp on our DEC unix box to shut down some
security holes. We had to do this because our hands are tied by a
third-party vendor whose software will cease to work with shadowed
passwords. We configured the ftp software to restrict access to a users
home directory.

We found that it caused errors with attaching documents in Pine and tracked
it down to the line in the pine.conf.fixed file that restricted users to a
specific directory (operating-dir=~). The behavior that the tilde caused
was for Pine to be unable to read the attachment from
/usr/users/students/username/./  Ironically, pilot, the browser part of
Pine, had no trouble with this arrangement.

Our solution came from one of our professors (whose help is priceless!).
What we ended up doing was setting an environment variable in our shell
that did this:

cd ~
setenv HOME2 $cwd

Then, we modified the operating-dir= in the pine.conf.fixed to be $HOME2.
This printed the home directory as /usr/users/students/username (stripped
of the /./ listed in the passwd file, as required by the restricted ftp).

Wa-la! Ftp access is restricted, attachments in Pine are restricted, and
everyone is happy. Now, if we could only get students to log off properly
(and in a timely manner) ...

Thanks for all your help!

	Sheryl

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From: Gregory A Lundberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 5 Sep 1998 18:05:43 -0400 (EDT)

> What we ended up doing was setting an environment variable in our shell

Ah.  I put something like that in my system profile (/etc/profile) because
it bugged me that the CWD feature for shell users wasn't showing '~' when
they were in their home directory.  What I did was:

HOME=`pwd`
export HOME

So when their shell starts up it removes the '/./' part needed for
wu-ftpd.

----

Gregory A Lundberg		Senior Partner, VRnet Company
1441 Elmdale Drive              [email-masked]
Kettering, OH 45409-1615 USA    1-800-809-2195