scs@lokkur.dexter.mi.us (Steve Simmons) (07/03/90)
In the former Subject: Re: 4/330 permissions woes flanagan@milton.u.washington.edu (Jim Flanagan) writes: > >I have a 4/330 running 4.0.3 which exhibits the following symptoms: > >o The "r-commands" (rsh, rlogin, rcp,...) fail to recognize the proper > setup of files like ~/.rhosts, /.rhosts, and /etc/hosts.equiv . . . poffen@sj.ate.slb.com (Russ Poffenberger) writes: >I saw this type of thing once on a Solbourne. At first I called Solbourne >asking if they had done something in their OS that did it. They couldn't >resolve it, they said it should work. What it finally turned out to be was >that the idiot who setup the system (not me) made the root login directory >in the /etc/passwd file point to /usr/root instead of the normal /. Since >.rhosts is ONLY checked in the home directory of the user that is trying >to rlogin, rsh, rcp, etc., it couldn't find it in /usr/root, since we had >modified the one in /. Ahem. Speaking as former scs@admin.aa.cad.slb.com, I have a reasonable guess as to why your former admin used /etc/root. There's a number of good reasons for it: We had continual problems with operators (and admins :-) leaving files lying around in /. The usual cause was wanting some temporary data storage and forgetting to go to /tmp. Having a separate home directory for / fixed that. We wanted to install some scripts for root/operator usage only and wanted them available even when (a) the system was in single-user or (b) /usr was trashed (ever do a full file restore of /, and destroy yourself when /bin/restore was overwritten? An extra copy of restore was soon found to be priceless). This isn't as important now, but was critical in 3.X days. A /etc/root/bin directory was the obvious choice. Reduced directory clutter: all the .login, .cshrc, .rhosts, etc files made for a cluttered / directory. The more files were there, the harder it was to determine what was leftover operator stuff and what was system stuff. There are some downsides to /etc/root, Russ has described some (but a simple RTFM fixes the ones he lists). Somewhat more cumbersome is vipw's habit of verifying the root account and *only* permitting '/' to be the home directory. A quick grab of BSD vipw and a few edits fixed that up just fine. Sorry, I don't have the patches -- they're somewhere in the bowels of aa.cad.slb.com. Administratively yours, Steve