SUMMARY: POP3 without a valid shell

From: Micah Anderson (micah@smmedia.com)
Date: Fri Aug 30 1996 - 13:52:55 CDT


Many thanks to all of you who responded with suggestions. I unfortunatly
forgot to mention in my original post that I had tried /bin/true and
/bin/false, which many of the suggestions pointed towards (thanks for
suggesting something tho!). The correct answer (meaning the answer which
fixed my problem) was sent to me by Richard Butler and in partiality is
included below:

!!!!
This effect appears to be due to a (security?) feature in qpopper. I seem
to remember that some programs need the shell to finish with sh to be
considered valid. You could try creating /bin/xyzsh linked to /bin/false
or /dev/null.
!!!!

Or you could try using a different POP3 daemon - I am using the Univ.
Washington IMAP + POP3 so that my users can use Pine etc via IMAP or Eudora
etc with POP3 according to their choices. In particular I have some accounts
like you want, but NOT in /etc/shells. For example one account has a shell
/bin/false so they can't telnet in; they can't ftp in because the shell is
not in /etc/shells; if they use pcpine or eudora they can read the mail quite
happily via IMAP or POP3.

The POP3 daemon is compiled together with IMAP from imap.tar available by
ftp from ftp.cac.washington.edu.

Hope this helps.

=========================================================================
Richard Butler Cell Biology Institute, C.N.R.
tel +39-6-86090360 viale C.Marx 43
fax +39-6-8273287 I-00137 ROME, Italy
richard@biocell.irmkant.rm.cnr.it
=========================================================================

_______________________________________________________________________________
Micah Johan Eckman Anderson micah@smmedia.com
Sr. Systems Administrator 1-888-614-3709
Schmidt Mead Media, Inc. pagemicah@smmedia.com
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