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From: greg@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Greg Noel)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: News Directory Problems
Message-ID: <1877@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM>
Date: Thu, 5-Nov-87 21:14:43 EST
Article-I.D.: ncr-sd.1877
Posted: Thu Nov  5 21:14:43 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 8-Nov-87 07:35:35 EST
References: <474@neptune.AMD.COM> <2120@lsuc.UUCP> <44176@beno.seismo.CSS.GOV>
Reply-To: greg@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Greg Noel)
Organization: NCR Corporation, Rancho Bernardo
Lines: 22

In article <44176@beno.seismo.CSS.GOV> rick@seismo.CSS.GOV (Rick Adams) writes:
>For a long time, inews has checked to see if it was running as root and
>if it was, assumed the worst and did setuid() calls to give it the
>intended permissions.
>
>This "shouldn't" be the problem.

Unfortunately, I believe it is the problem.  We had the same problem here (news
directories being created owned by root) and it was eventually traced to uucp
being invoked by root when running as an ethernet server.  The generic ethernet
server (necessarily run as root) executed a simple set-UID program that did a
setuid(geteuid()) and then executed uucico.  We found that, for some reason, a
set-UID program invoked by root doesn't operate the same way as a non-set-UID
program; something gets confused.  We ended up having to run the intermediate
program as a non-set-UID program; it did a stat() of uucico to find out the
UID/GID to set itself to.

The above is for System V; if you have a UCB system, your mileage may vary.
If somebody has sources, I'd be curious as to just what is going on; I can't
explain it, and once the "cure" of the non-set-UID intermediate program was
discovered, I stopped pursuing the problem.
-- 
-- Greg Noel, NCR Rancho Bernardo   Greg.Noel@SanDiego.NCR.COM  or  greg@ncr-sd