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From: marc@uni-paderborn.de (Marc Gumbold)
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
Subject: Re: The case of the phantom chowner (solved ?)
Keywords: chown("",NEWSID,NEWSGRP)
Message-ID: <1990Aug3.071135.27596@uni-paderborn.de>
Date: 3 Aug 90 07:11:35 GMT
References: <1990Jul24.071014.4809@brolga.cc.uq.oz.au>
Organization: Uni-GH Paderborn, FB17/Informatik
Lines: 35

ant@brolga.cc.uq.oz.au (Anthony Murdoch) writes:

>Greetings nntp/cnews administrators everywhere,

>I'd like to take you if I may, ...... , on a strange journey.  This is the
>story of "The Phantom 'chown'er."

>It all started a couple of weeks ago, when I changed from nntp 1.5.5 to 
>1.5.9 .  After some initial teething problems, everything appeared to be
>working happily.  And then it happened.

>A seemingly random file (actually a directory) was being chowned to news.news
>at apparently random intervals.  After some investigation, we found that the
>Phantom was working in close cahoots (sp?) with the nntpd.  Everytime that

[most interesting story deleted]

>BTW, has anyone else noticed this strange behavior ?  It seems a weird thing
>for chown to do when given an empty string.

God! It happens to our root directory and did happen to some of the dir's
under /. Who knows which other directories may be affected... I don't dare
looking it up... but root is annoying enough anyway.

I've had no idea so far. I examined my C-News software, but with no obvious 
success. Next candidate would have been nntp, of course. We're running 1.5.8. 

Boy, am I glad I'm not the only one with that problem in the world.
I'll try your patch. Thank you very very much for posting.

Marc
-- 

   Marc Gumbold    EMail: marc@uni-paderborn.de       Phone: +49 5251 60 3803
                   Snail: Uni-GH Paderborn, FB17i, 4790 Paderborn, W. Germany