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3.4 Runtime Privileges

By default smapd runs with the privileges of the user that started it. Normally, this user is root. If you wish it to switch to some unprivileged user after startup, use the user configuration statement:

user daemon

The above example instructs smapd to switch to the UID of the user ‘daemon’ and to the GID of its principal group. The rest of groups the user might be a member of is dropped. To retain all supplementary user groups, use the allgroup statement. Its argument is a boolean value, i.e. ‘yes’, ‘on’, ‘true’, or ‘t’ to indicate the true value, and ‘no’, ‘off’, ‘false’ or ‘nil’ to indicate false. So, to switch to the user ‘daemon’ and also retain all its supplementary groups, one would write:

user daemon
allgroups yes

You may also retain only some of the user’s group, or even some groups the user is not member of. This is done using the group statement:

user daemon
group mail mysql

Arguments to group are any number of valid group names.

Notice, that while running smapd with non-root privileges might be a good idea, it may render some modules useless. For example, the mailutils module in ‘mbq’ mode (see mbq) requires root privileges for normal operation. To allow for such uses, instead of setting global user privileges, set them on a per-server basis. See servers, for a detailed discussion of this technique.