Xref: utzoo news.software.b:8479 news.software.readers:95 Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.software.readers Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!yale.edu!cmcl2!panix!alexis From: alexis@panix.uucp (Alexis Rosen) Subject: Re: Two queries regarding C-News (one of which also hits rn) Message-ID: <1991Jun28.084515.29919@panix.uucp> Date: Fri, 28 Jun 91 08:45:15 GMT References: <1991Jun27.201257.29111@zoo.toronto.edu> Organization: PANIX - Public Access Unix Systems of NY henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes: >francis@cis.ohio-state.edu (RD Francis) writes: >>2) This one is much more serious. rn users have, on two or three >>separate occasions now, been told that all of their newsgroups were >>bogus, and been unsubscribed from everything... > >No ideas about this one. There is inherently a short window during a >delgroup when files are being rewritten, but I'd be surprised if rn was >consistently hitting it. I can't believe you guys haven't been asked about this one zillions of times. It messed me up good before I modified delgroups. I've been meaning to post a request for you to fix/change this for a while, since it may not be a bug, but it's definitely a deficiency. The problem is that if you run delgroups as root, the active file becomes owned by root. And if UMASK is to 600 (or do I mean 177?), the new active file won't be readable by others (this last is supposition, since I've only been bitten by part one, but that's bad enough). Of course, you _should_ run delgroups as news, but since none of us are perfect and news tasks are often dealt with by an admin running as root (again, despite "better practice" rules), I think delgroups should have lines to do appropriate chowns and chmods. Come to think of it, this may not be his problem, since this would require human intervention to be fixed. But it should be dealt with anyway... --- Alexis Rosen Owner/Sysadmin, PANIX Public Access Unix, NY alexis@panix.com {cmcl2,apple}!panix!alexis