clewis@eci386.uucp (Chris Lewis) (02/03/90)
In article <371@westmark.UU.NET> dave@westmark.UU.NET (Dave Levenson) writes: [ regarding ps/ps_data problems ] > I would like to thank all of the net.friends who replied to this > posting. To summarize the replies, the ps command must be installed > setgid sys, and the ownership of the /etc directory must be user > root, group sys. The modes of the /etc directory must be 775. > I'm not sure why this was that way. We installed the UNIX > foundation set, and then a number of add-on packages, and I'm not > sure where, along the way, the group of /etc got changed. It's probably due to one or more of the add-on packages. Sometimes due to which user you install things with. We discovered with ISC 386/ix 1.0.6 that after we had loaded some of the ISC options that things like /, /usr, /bin, /etc had become mode 777 and other similar wierdnesses. This was reported to HCR (Canadian distributor of 386/ix) over a year ago. For a considerably worse situation, regard the 3b1 - depending on the circumstances, ordinary everyday operations with UA can result in things like /etc or / being mode 777 (which someone took advantage of some time ago before we implemented our security package), and setgetty has been known to change /etc/inittab to mode 666. UA can also scramble /etc/passwd and L.sys entries. (not to mention the out-and-out unplugable security holes that are liberally sprinkled throughout UA). Our security package reports at least one vital permission correction made *daily* on our 3b1's, which is pretty frightening when you consider that we don't even use UA anymore... On the other hand, without software installations, *nothing* has ever changed "mysteriously" on the 386. When we install our package on other systems, you'd be amazed at the things you find - very large Deltas, Towers, RT's etc. with world writable /bin, /dev, /etc etc.. Sheesh. This isn't exclusive to ISC... Let this be a lesson - check the permissions/ownership of vital things after software installations - the / made world writable may be yours.... -- Chris Lewis, Elegant Communications Inc, {uunet!attcan,utzoo}!lsuc!eci386!clewis Ferret mailing list: eci386!ferret-list, psroff mailing list: eci386!psroff-list