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Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!janus.Berkeley.EDU!kennish
From: kennish@janus.Berkeley.EDU (Ken A. Nishimura)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.ultrix
Subject: Re: xload: restricted operation on file system
Keywords: xload error message
Message-ID: <30917@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 25 Aug 89 20:21:44 GMT
References: <714@larry.sal.wisc.edu>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: kennish@janus.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Ken A. Nishimura)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 18

In article <714@larry.sal.wisc.edu> jwp@larry.sal.wisc.edu (Jeffrey W Percival) writes:
>We have a flock of Ultrix vaxes and workstations, and I
>like to have a few "xload" displays on my workstation
>screen.  I do a "rsh foo xload ..." for each CPU I want to look at.
>Most work fine, but one comes back with "restricted operation
>on file system".
>
>What causes this message, and how do I fix it?
>-- 
xload reads /dev/kmem to get the load average figures.  On many
machines, /dev/kmem is not readable by the average user for
security reasons.  As such, xload is usually setgid "kmem" and
/dev/kmem is chgrp'ed to kmem and made group readable.  Now,
if the xload binary is NFS mounted and the nosuid flag is set,
then you will get the above message.  Also, if anyone other than
root mounts a filesystem, the nosuid flag is automatically set.

				-ken