Received: (at submit) by bugs.debian.org; 23 Jun 1997 14:56:58 +0000 Received: (qmail 14035 invoked from network); 23 Jun 1997 14:56:55 -0000 Received: from gatekeeper.verisim.com (207.134.10.201) by master.debian.org with SMTP; 23 Jun 1997 14:56:55 -0000 Received: from callandor ([192.168.1.3]) by gatekeeper.verisim.com with smtp id m0wgAXv-000eUvC (Debian Smail-3.2 1996-Jul-4 #2); Mon, 23 Jun 1997 10:56:27 -0400 (EDT) Sender: bcwhite Message-ID: <33AE8EAA.1191F65E@verisim.com> Date: Mon, 23 Jun 1997 10:56:22 -0400 From: Brian White Organization: Verisim, Inc. http://www.verisim.com/ X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01 (X11; I; Linux 2.0.29 i486) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Debian Bugs Subject: inetd can inherit bad env vars Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Package: netbase Version: 2.13-1 If root has environment variables set and inetd gets restarted (either manually or during a package upgrade), then inetd inherits these variables and passes them down to the processes it spawns. This can sometimes cause very odd behavior. While this is mostly the fault of the user for setting vars for root, it would be nice if the script that starts inetd could unset/reset common variables. The important ones I can think of off hand are... SHELL=/bin/sh TMPDIR= It might also be worth getting rid of other common ones like DISPLAY, HOME, USER, LOGNAME, etc. Brian ( bcwhite@verisim.com ) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not.