Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!ncoast!allbery
From: allbery@NCoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.internals
Subject: Re: non-superuser chown(2)s considered harmful
Message-ID: <1990Dec16.034826.10742@NCoast.ORG>
Date: 16 Dec 90 03:48:26 GMT
References: <1990Dec10.231812.23634@gjetor.geac.COM> <1990Dec12.052114.2694@athena.mit.edu> <18687@netcom.UUCP>
Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR)
Followup-To: comp.unix.internals
Organization: North Coast Public Access *NIX, Cleveland, OH
Lines: 30

As quoted from <18687@netcom.UUCP> by dsmythe@netcom.UUCP (Dave Smythe):
+---------------
| In article <1990Dec12.052114.2694@athena.mit.edu> jfc@athena.mit.edu (John F Carr) writes:
| >In article <1990Dec10.231812.23634@gjetor.geac.COM>
| >	adeboer@gjetor.geac.COM (Anthony DeBoer) writes:
| >
| >>Just for my $0.02 worth, if quotas are in effect, why not have a nightly
| >>daemon that goes through each user's directory and blows away anything he/she
| >>doesn't own?  This should take care of out-chowning files to bypass
| >>allocation.
| >
| >It is much more polite to chown the files to the owner of the directory,
| 
| Suppose there are multiple links to the file; who gets to own it?  The last
| person visited by your chown'ing utility?  Or do you only chown files with
| only a single link?
+---------------

The other problem is that the sysadmin is going to be in big trouble when I
come in the next day and discover that my latest development copy of qzt
(which is setuid uucp) has been blown away or un-permissioned....  Admitted,
group vectors are nice, but I'd need an infinitely sized group vector to cover
all the possibilities, so some things are still setuid instead of setgid.

++Brandon
-- 
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