After posting my summary on this I rec'd a number of helpful replies.
I want to pass them along.
Regards,
Judith Reed
jreed_at_appliedtheory.com
(315) 453-2912 x5835
My question -
> We have recurring problems with sendmail 8.9.3 on our alphas because
> /var is always set group write on reboot, and sendmail doesn't like it.
> We manually reset it to g-w after boots, and everything seems to work
> fine. Does anyone know of any reason why this addition of read access
> is done at boot, and of any reason why we can't have a boot time script
> to chmod it back to no read?
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Dr. Tom Blinn said:
I believe it's one of the startup scripts that mucks with it. You can
do what most people have done -- muck the scripts, but be sure to keep
a record of what you changed, since it will probably revert when you go
to a newer version. Most of the startup scripts don't have protected
customizations. In fact, you might want to create your own scripts to
do the protection changes and sandwich them around things that seem to
care
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Peter Stern says:
We use sendmail v8.9.3 and it was enough to change the group permissions
on /var/adm/sendmail/ and /var/adm/ to make sendmail happy and these
are not reset on reboot.
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Serguei Patchkovskii said:
It's done by xdm startup script (not by the /sbin/init.d/xlogin directly,
but by something called from it - the name of the offender escapes me now).
... since we do not use X, I just removed the links to xlogin from /sbin/rc?.d
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Phil Farrell says:
I noticed the same problem when I upgraded from DUnix 3.2 to 4.0.
I modified /sbin/rc.3 to show the permissions on /var after each
script in /sbin/rc3.d was run and discovered that the "S95xlogin"
script (link to /sbin/init.d/xlogin) was the culprit. Nothing
in the script itself changes the permissions on /var, but some
program that starts (perhaps dtlogin itself?) does.
I created a little script /sbin/init.d/fixperms with link to
/sbin/rc3.d/S96fixperms to run right after S95xlogin. This
script simply reset the permissions on /var. This made
sendmail happy.
But now, I think this might be causing another problem. When users
connect via X terminals, they get a message about some program that
cannot be run because of lack of permissions. They click the OK button
and proceed.
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One respondant notes with some consternation:
The extraordinary thing about this is that this was reported
to Digital (which it was then - not Compaq) years ago and still
hasn't been fixed.
Received on Mon Mar 20 2000 - 18:18:32 NZST