Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!pilchuck!amc-gw!morpho!larry
From: larry@morpho.UUCP (Larry Morris)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.aix
Subject: chown broken in 3.1 ?
Message-ID: <384@morpho.UUCP>
Date: 5 Sep 90 18:43:06 GMT
Reply-To: larry@morpho.UUCP (Larry Morris)
Distribution: na
Organization: North American Morpho Systems, Inc.  Tacoma, WA
Lines: 15

I am having some problems getting our RCS package running on the 6000.
The co commmand runs as suid rcs.   After checking out the file it then
attempts to chown() the file to the correct owner.  This works fine on
AIX2 and on the systems we originally ported from, but not on AIX 3.
The chown() call now requires that co have root permissions in order to
perform the chown.  In my case, although co "owns" the file the chown() 
returns EPERM (obvious, but not listed in the man pages).  As usual IBM
says tough, it works as documented.  Who cares if it acts like unix?

I can see where this might fix some serious security holes inherent with
remote file systems, but does the rest of the world do this?  Or is this
another one of IBM's better ideas?  I am open to suggestions on how to work 
around this, although I'm not very open to having the entire RCS package 
run suid root.  Maybe I'll just write a small program to do all my chowns
and have it run suid root. :-)/2