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From: duane@anasaz.UUCP (Duane Morse)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Ownership and permission of news directories and files
Summary: Correction on directory permissions
Message-ID: <727@anasaz.UUCP>
Date: 15 Sep 89 22:23:27 GMT
References: <703@anasaz.UUCP> <717@anasaz.UUCP>
Organization: Anasazi Inc., Phoenix AZ
Lines: 23

In article <717@anasaz.UUCP>, duane@anasaz.UUCP (Duane Morse) writes:
> 'news' should be the owner of all news directories and files, and
> the 'news' group should be the group owner of same. Permissions should
> be rwxr-xr-x or rwxrwxr-x for directories and rw-r--r--
> or rw-rw-r-- for files.

An alert reader noted an error with my statement about directory
permissions. News directories are usually created on the fly when
the first news article comes in for that directory; this means that
the program which gets things started (e.g., uucp) has the real uid
and gid, and if the parent directory isn't rwxrwxrwx, the subdirectory
cannot be created even though the parent is owned by 'news' and
rnews has the setuid bit turned on.
(The real story is no doubt much more complicated.)

In short, news directories should probably have rwxrwxrwx permissions.
rnews knows enough to do this on its own, but if you ever have to
recreate the directories (for whatever reason), keep the permissions
and ownership in mind.
-- 

Duane Morse	...{asuvax or mcdphx}!anasaz!duane
(602) 861-7609