SUMMARY: /dev/null permissions changing

From: William Unruh (unruh@physics.ubc.ca)
Date: Tue Oct 15 1991 - 17:41:40 CDT


I complained that /dev/null permissions kept changing to rw root,
nothing anyone else. a number of people had seen the same thing happen
sporadically, but no definitive reason. The only suggestion was that
some cron job was doing it. One suggested that some suid root job might
be at fault, and suggested I run cops to check on any strange suid root
jobs. Another suggested that he had had similar problems with a program
called expect.

>I have seen this phenomenon on a Sun4/110 running SunOS 4.1 where an
>interpreter named ``expect''* was driving a script invoked by cron
>with root privledges. When I stopped using expect in this way,
>/dev/null stopped changing its permissions.
>
>Are you using expect or other PD software as root?
>
>* expect(1) - programmed dialogue with interactive programs:
> by Don Libes, National Institute of Standards and Technology
> available from your favorite PD srcs archive server.

I was not using expect.

The problem has not occurred in the past week, so it may have been the
errant sliplogin (see another recent complaint to this news by me).

Thanks to
jdavis@noao.edu
David Fetrow fetrow@orac.biostat.washington.edu
"Anthony A. Datri" datri@concave.convex.com
erueg@cfgauss.uni-math.gwdg.de
smb@ulysses.att.com
peb@ueci.com
hardman@ukjm35.SINet.SLB
coe@phil.mop.com
stan@nli.com



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