My original message is at the end of this note;
Thanks to Alan Rollow and Paul Crittenden for their answers which were
posted after my somewhat hasty first summary.
Alan Rollow suggested an easy way of checking and (with caution) fixing the
problem. A portion of his message follows:
>See what may be changed, use fverify from the root using the
>inventory files in /usr/.smdb./*.inv as input. Be sure to
>use the option that prevents it from fixing anything. Sometimes
>files change after installation and "fixing" it could make
>things much worse.
What I found was that I needed to use the files OSFBASE350.inv and
OSFPRINT350.inv as input for the usr/bin and the /usr/var/spool problems.
I found these by issuing the command cat *.inv | grep /usr/bin in the
/usr/.smdb./ directory, and doing the same for /spool .
The su, chfn, chsh commands were not working because a user under su
apparently issued a chmod 777 * in the /usr/bin directory. I still haven't
tracked down the reason why my spool directories were user/group
daemon/daemon instead of root/system.
Again, when using the fverify command, follow the advice above and USE
CAUTION.
Thanks to all,
Jason
<--- original message --->
Please help,
Since earlier this afternoon, access to certain programs in /usr/bin has
been removed from user logins, from the console or otherwise (they still
work for root).
These include such things as su, chfn and chsh. The commands appear to be
accepted, but fail somewhere. For instance, the sialog records the
following when I try to su:
SIA:ERROR Wed Oct 29 18:44:41 1997
Failure on authentication for su from jason to root
The su command doesn't even prompt me for a password. It just executes,
and returns to the user prompt. chfn and chsh exhibit similar behaviour.
The lp command also started choking at the same time (again, for users, it
works under root) with the following error:
lpr: cannot chown /usr/spool/plotter/tfA002pss.com
Finally, attempting to login as root from the console or a tty (with ptys
temporarily added to the securetty file) results in the DECTerm crashing
with an error that I can't read in time.
I'm not sure what I or one of the other admins may have done that would
have caused this. Could someone tell me what the permissions, ownership
and group
for /usr /usr/bin and the utils should be? Any other suggestions?
Thanks,
Jason
Received on Fri Oct 31 1997 - 17:50:09 NZDT