Path: utzoo!utgpu!cunews!micor!latour!ecicrl!clewis
From: clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca (Chris Lewis)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: cnews spooling trouble
Message-ID: <1509@ecicrl.ocunix.on.ca>
Date: 17 May 91 02:14:16 GMT
References: <1991May12.234639.18084@xyzoom.info.com> <1991May13.161913.1812@zoo.toronto.edu> <1494@ecicrl.ocunix.on.ca> <1991May15.071141.1990@xyzoom.info.com>
Organization: Elegant Communications Inc., Ottawa, Canada
Lines: 44

In article <1991May15.071141.1990@xyzoom.info.com> rob@xyzoom.info.com (Rob Lingelbach) writes:
>In article <1494@ecicrl.ocunix.on.ca> clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca (Chris Lewis) writes:
>>Rob answered "yes" to the "can your machine do setuid(geteuid())".  ISC
>>386/IX cannot.  He has to set it to "no" and rebuild.

>I made the change and did the rebuild, and the same thing is
>happening (newsrun complains that it can't create
>/usr/lib/news/L.<pid>). I made /usr/lib/news mode 777 and the lock file 
>was written allowing newsrun to work; as soon as I changed 
>$NEWSCTL back to 775 it didn't work.

I suspect what's happening is that the rebuilds are somehow not doing
the whole job of "switching".  When you answer "no", relaynews is
supposed to be invoked by a small setuid *root* program "setnewsid".
This is required on all System V systems (not sure about SVR4, but that
doesn't apply to you) I think a make clean is in order, and then a careful
examination of what the installation stuff is doing and what it's deciding
*not* to do.  Did doit.bin create setnewsid?  Did "again.root" install it?  Did
you forget to run all four doit's in the right order?

>I am testing (and failing) by feeding an article to rnews while
>logged in as a regular user.  If I feed an article to rnews while 
>logged in as news, it works.  My newsfeed is via uucp; is rnews invoked 
>with the caller's permissions, and if the caller is allowed the 
>command (/usr/bin/rnews) in /usr/lib/uucp/Permissions, shouldn't it work?

Rnews is usually invoked as the uid of the process that invoked uuxqt.
Which has the real id as *anyone* (but the effective will be "uucp").
In order to get the real and effective id's to be "news", setnewsids has
to be invoked for newsspool to work.

(I don't have a C-news system up handy at the moment, but setnewsids
is definately required on an ISC machine, if setnewsids isn't required,
I don't think that the other programs should be setuid news)

Doesn't entirely explain why the lock can't be created tho.

What are the ownerships on the other files in /usr/lib/news?  What
owner does the lock file get created?
-- 
Chris Lewis, Phone: (613) 832-0541, Domain: clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca
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