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From: silvert@cs.dal.ca (Bill Silvert)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
Subject: Re: ELM on IRISES (No write acces in /usr/mail ?)
Summary: solution found
Message-ID: <1991Feb28.203613.19846@cs.dal.ca>
Date: 28 Feb 91 20:36:13 GMT
References: <5079@unlisys.in-berlin.de> <1991Feb27.152120.26619@cs.dal.ca> <5220@unlisys.in-berlin.de>
Sender: silvert@cs.dal.ca.UUCP (Bill Silvert)
Reply-To: bill%biomel@cs.dal.ca
Organization: Habitat Ecology Div., Bedford Inst. of Oceanography
Lines: 28

In article <5220@unlisys.in-berlin.de> rot@unlisys.in-berlin.de (Robert Rothe) writes:
>
>>the lock files (which it tries to do in /usr/mail).  The solution which
>>worked for me was to change the permissions on /usr/mail from 775 to
>>3777 (rwxrwxr-x to rwxrwsrwt), which seems very common on Suns, although
>>I don't understand why (by the way, mail with exactly the same
>>premissions has no such problems).
>
>Making /usr/mail writeable for all doesn't seem to be the solution ..

Anyone can write to the directory, but not delete files, so it is not
that big a hole.  Apparently most Suns have these permissions.

>>Somehow it seems that setgid() doesn't work right.  Syd suggested that
>>perhaps it should be setegid(), but I'm no expert on this stuff.
>
>Can anybody confirm that 'setgid (getegid())' doesn't work on irix ?

I got mail from Paul Close that solved the problem.  I changed d_vfork
at his suggestion to undef and recompiled.  According to Paul, the
problem is with vfork on the Iris, and related problems with setgid.
I'm no expert on these things, but I'm glad to have it working.
However, the same solution did not apply to the Stardent.
-- 
William Silvert, Habitat Ecology Division, Bedford Inst. of Oceanography
P. O. Box 1006, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, CANADA B2Y 4A2.  Tel. (902)426-1577
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