Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Setnewsids & friends: Xenix
Message-ID: <1989Sep8.152207.16562@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1989Sep7.121749.26502@datlog.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 8 Sep 89 15:22:07 GMT

In article <1989Sep7.121749.26502@datlog.co.uk> news@datlog.co.uk (news service) writes:
>Relaynews fails because it will not change its operating id to news.

Most probable reason is misconfiguration, notably that your $NEWSCTL/bin/config
does not agree with the configuration parameters subst'ed into other files.
Relaynews will renounce setuid privileges if it sees environment variables
that do not agree with the ones it gets from the library configuration
routines.  (The environment variables override the library values, and this
is very useful for testing, but security considerations make it unwise to
retain setuid powers in this situation.)

Note that one of our most recent patches added a comment to $NEWSCTL/bin/config
to warn people that it is *not* a master configuration file, and changing
things there and only there will *not* change them everywhere.
-- 
V7 /bin/mail source: 554 lines.|     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
1989 X.400 specs: 2200+ pages. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu