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From: slb@boole.acc.virginia.edu (sandy)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: News Directory Problems
Message-ID: <315@boole.acc.virginia.edu>
Date: Wed, 4-Nov-87 16:05:41 EST
Article-I.D.: boole.315
Posted: Wed Nov  4 16:05:41 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 8-Nov-87 07:06:09 EST
References: <474@neptune.AMD.COM> <2120@lsuc.UUCP>
Reply-To: slb@boole.UUCP (PUT YOUR NAME HERE)
Organization: University of Va., Charlottesville, VA
Lines: 22

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.

I think the problem is that inews and mkdir are both setuid programs.
When inews runs the real id is whoever called inews, and the effective
id is news (or whoever you use at your site).  When mkdir is called,
the effective uid becomes root and the real uid is still whoever
called inews, so that person ends up owning the directory.  Inews tries
to get around this by doing a setuid(geteuid()) when it is run by root,
but many systems (like SYSV) don't allow this.  Some suggestions for
workaround are given in section 7.3 of the Installation Guide.

sandy
-- 
sandy bryant
slb@virginia.edu
uunet!virginia!slb