Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!news.cs.indiana.edu!samsung!dali.cs.montana.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!uunet!wsrcc.com!wolfgang
From: wolfgang@wsrcc.com (Wolfgang S. Rupprecht)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: I need help with a relaynews problem...
Message-ID: <1991Feb21.042744.26770@wsrcc.com>
Date: 21 Feb 91 04:27:44 GMT
References: <365@camdev.comm.mot.com?> <1991Feb19.214903.22845@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: Wolfgang S Rupprecht Computer Consulting, Washington DC.
Lines: 23

>[...]the usual cause of "everything's fine except that nobody can
>post an article" is permission problems.  A local posting is the only
>situation in which the setuid machinery really gets exercised.

Yes. I just experienced this.  Local posting quietly failed because
relaynews didn't like the $NEWSUMASK environment variable it was
passed.  Grumble.  If it doesn't like the recommended umask why didn't
it just *ignore* the recommendation?  As it is, relaynews seems to use
any excuse to revoke its setuid privileges and then fail at the
following lock-file manipulations.  This leads to a failed posting.
In this case the failed posting came from sendmail so no humans ever
saw the output on stderr.  I would have missed these failures entirely
if I hadn't seen the disected headers/msg-bodies in /tmp.

Oh, the source of the incorrect umask?  Apparently .../news/bin/conf
was never updated (a local build permissions problem???).  Relaynews
"knew" the correct umask to use since this knowledge was compiled in,
but saw an incorrect version in the environment.

-wolfgang
-- 
Wolfgang Rupprecht    wolfgang@wsrcc.com (or) uunet!wsrcc!wolfgang
Snail Mail Address:   Box 6524, Alexandria, VA 22306-0524