[1886] in bugtraq
Re: From the moderator: READ Please
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert M. Haas)
Mon May 22 20:55:51 1995
To: woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods)
Cc: claudio@fire.di.unipi.it (Claudio Telmon), bugtraq@crimelab.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 22 May 1995 09:10:25 MDT."
<199505221510.JAA06128@ncar.ucar.EDU>
Date: Mon, 22 May 1995 16:26:58 -0700
From: "Robert M. Haas" <rhaas@cygnus.arc.nasa.gov>
> Most likely it is so that sendmail can determine the load average. It
> has a feature that it will start queueing everything (rather than
> delivering immediately) at one load threshhold, and another threshhold
> at which it will begin refusing connections altogether. On some
> systems, there is a system call to get the load average through the
> kernel. On those where there is not, it is necessary to read /dev/kmem
> to get this information.
Sendmail runs as root, though. I would think setgid kmem privileges
would be superfluous.
...Robert
