[COFF] UUCP on macOS / *BSD

[arrigo at alchemistowl.org (Arrigo Triulzi)]

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On 29 Jun 2020, at 18:43, Grant Taylor via COFF <coff at minnie.tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
> On 6/29/20 9:53 AM, Arrigo Triulzi via COFF wrote:
>> I run UUCP on OpenBSD for some very remote sites connected with satellite modems (using UUCP-over-IP, not pure UUCP, where the dial-up script initiates the UUCP exchange). UUCP was recently removed from the base OpenBSD distribution but is still available as a package.
> 
> Do you by chance recall what UUCP software was being used?  Was it by chance Taylor UUCP?  Or was it some other UUCP package in OpenBSD?

It is indeed Taylor UUCP.

> I did have to enable Set UID & GID on some of the UUCP binaries.  -  I don't know if this is a macOS thing that's broken or if it's a difference in how UUCP operates on BSD or something else I'm ignorant of.

Yes, UUCP binaries do have setuid set, even on OpenBSD. Indeed, in the interest of removing setuid binaries, UUCP was completely removed from base OpenBSD and moved to packages.

> Currently, it seems like UUCP is largely working, save for the fact that users other than _uucp (yes, including the leading underscore) can't access the SSH key file that's used as part of the pipe transport.

The key file won't normally work if permissions are more permissive than 0600 so that is not surprising. Is it doing tunnelling between two ports, i.e. using -L etc.? I'm assuming you are then using uucpd on the remote end listening on the appropriate, forwarded, port which would suggest that you don't need UUCP to setup the connection as long as it has access to the local forwarded port?

> I should document what I'm doing, both as notes for my self (self serving) and for others (good of the community).

Also for debugging purposes, i.e. showing us so that we can see the issues you discuss :)

>> Are you trying to configure dial-up UUCP or UUCP-over-IP with uucpd?
> 
> I'm trying to configure UUCP-over-SSH.  It's probably closer to UUCP-over-modem than it is UUCP-over-IP (TCP).  The ""modem pipe is the ssh command which remotely connects to the destination host (using keys to authenticate) and launching uucico through the SSH connection STDIO.

Right, never did that in my life… I set things up when (open)SSH was v1.2 and port forwarding not quite there yet.

Arrigo