Mac OS 10.15 and above had very tight controls on what can run in user space. Areas are
designated off limits and blocked for security reasons. According to apple. OS X 11 is
worse.
K.
On 1 Jul 2020, at 20:13, Grant Taylor via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
?On 6/28/20 6:48 PM, Grant Taylor wrote:
Does anyone have any experience with UUCP on
macOS or *BSD systems that would be willing to help me figure something out?
I ended up getting this to work.
I don't know if it was a macOSism or a *BSDism, but the root of the problem was
crossing between users via setuid / setgid in relation to OpenSSH.
Two different versions of macOS behaved differently.
macOS Yosemite 10.10.5 runs the underlying ssh pipe command as the user account that
initiates the uucp / uuto / uux.
macOS Catalina 10.15.15 runs the underlying ssh pipe command as the _uucp user, NOT the
account that initiates the uucp / uuto / uux.
As such, on macOS Yosemite 10.10.5, I have to have the normal user's ssh public key
in the authorized_keys file on the remote system.
Conversely, on macOS Catalina 10.15.15, I have to have the _uucp user's ssh public
key in the authorized_keys file on the remote system.
I don't know why macOS Yosemite 10.10.5 and macOS Catalina 10.15.15 are behaving
differently, but they are.
These inconsistencies made identifying which client ssh config file -- nominally
~/.ssh/config -- was used cumbersome.
For some unknown reason, I couldn't rely on "~/" or defaults to specify the
_uucp user's key (Identity) file or the known_hosts file on macOS Catalina 10.15.15,
despite the fact that it was running as the _uucp user. I ended up having to hard code
the paths, as they were defaulting to the original user account that initiated the uucp /
uuto / uux.
I can only surmise that something is fundamentally different between Linux and macOS in
how it does things when changing user accounts via setuid & setgid as I did not have
any of these problems on multiple Linux machines. I can further surmise that something is
different between macOS Yosemite 10.10.5 and macOS Catalina 10.15.15. I don't know if
this is related to System Integrity Protection or something else.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die