Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bbn!apple!oliveb!ames!sgi!olson@anchor.SGI.COM
From: olson@anchor.SGI.COM (Dave Olson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
Subject: Re: Permissive permissions
Message-ID: <32541@sgi.SGI.COM>
Date: 11 May 89 06:11:47 GMT
References: <8905101851.AA09754@inls2.UCSD.EDU>
Sender: daemon@sgi.SGI.COM
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc., Mountain View, CA
Lines: 18

It turns out that when we made the master drives from which
the shipped drives are copied, no one noticed that
/ was permission 777.  mkfs created the root of the new
filesystem with this permission in the absence of a 
prototype.  mkfs has since been fixed to create the root
mode 755, and lost+found with mode 700.

The master drives were updated when 3.1D was released, and
all future releases will no longer have this problem (note that
simply performing an upgrade will NOT fix the problem, however).
The fact that it went un-noticed (or at least uncomplained about)
for so long (literally years) just goes to show that most of our
systems are installed in rather friendly enviroments, I guess.
--
	Dave Olson

It's important to keep an open mind, but not so open
that your brains fall out. -- Stephen A. Kallis, Jr.