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Path: utzoo!lsuc!dave
From: dave@lsuc.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: News Directory Problems
Message-ID: <2120@lsuc.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 1-Nov-87 03:39:04 EST
Article-I.D.: lsuc.2120
Posted: Sun Nov  1 03:39:04 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 1-Nov-87 10:46:58 EST
References: <474@neptune.AMD.COM>
Reply-To: dave@lsuc.UUCP (David Sherman)
Organization: Law Society of Upper Canada, Toronto
Lines: 27
Summary: suid doesn't always work when run by root

In article <474@neptune.AMD.COM> brian@neptune.AMD.COM (Brian McMinn) writes:
>Why are new spool directories owned by root instead of news?
>
>					Seems that the
>directory was created by and is owned by root instead of news.
>
>Our inews program is suid "news".  Any help would be appreciated.

On some versions of UNIX (including vanilla v7), setUID is
disabled for root. There's actually code in the kernel that
doesn't do what the setUID bit does if it's rn by root.
I don't know why this "feature" was first installed, but it's
likely the cause of your problem. root is running inews as
root; then later, someone runs inews as news or uucp, and
can't write into the directory.

Just make sure that you don't run inews from crontab or as root,
if you have this feature. If crontab is the problem, just stick
a "su news" in front of the code that is ultimately running
inews (rnews -U or whatever).

David Sherman
The Law Society of Upper Canada
Toronto
-- 
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