Re: ownership of devices

[Martin P Holland <nospam [at] noether.freeserve.co.uk>]

On Tue, 24 Aug 1999, you wrote:

>> My /dev directory seems to contain a lot of devices owned by
>> my non-root username. This can't be right can it? What could be causing this
to
>> happen?
>>
>> (For the record I'm running RH6, so glibc2.1, and kernel 2.2.10.)
>>
>
>This is a buglet. I think it happens when you run config utilities that create
/dev files as a user with superuser permissions or as a user running su or sudo.
>All the /dev files are usually owned by root or in soime cases by special
users. I have found that, if you have a multiuser system, you have to alter
most of these wrongly designated /dev files to root.root or root.disk, etc and
alter the permissions for access to suit to allow the system to run properly.
>This did not seem to happen with RH5.2 AFAIK.

Firstly thanks for the reassurance that this isn't just me. I am pretty sure
that it didn't happen in RH5.1. I would be interested to see any references to
this. I had a search on deja news but didn't find anything. Although this is
quite difficult to search for as dev turns up quite a lot and it's not clear
how to refine. I also tried redhat's bugzilla which was a totally frustrating
experience (you seem to have to type in a username and password everytime you
do anything, not just once, grrrr).

Peter are you using any automatic system to reset the device ownerships? Or do
you just do it as the need arises when something is broken?

Stephen's theory that this is a _deliberate_ mistake is interesting but even if
this is so, in practice, (until other programs are aware of it) it definitely
operates as a bug. For example, if I am logged in as one user and startx then
shutdown x but _don't_ logout and then login on another terminal as another user
then startup x this screws up the sound in kde, presumably because the sound
devices are still owned by the previous user.

I also found that when I recompiled the kernel (sued from martin) and as is my
custom used the mkbootdisk command to make the first stage of a rescue set
it barfed. Presumably again because of the owner of floppy was martin.

So this confirms my general feeling about RH6. Lots of nice new technology
which I must admit I am enjoying using but the cost of this is that various
things haven't been properly sorted out yet.

I did seriously consider going for debian to get something stable (I even
boosted the Linux Emporiums's profits) but in the end of I decided I couldn't do
without the very latest technology (and I didn't want to be relying on a
version of debian that was described as _unstable_).
I'd be interested to hear other people's take on this.

Also, if anyone wants the 4 cd cheapbytes debian 2.1 set they are most welcome
:-)

atb
Martin
--
http://www.shef.ac.uk/~pm1mph

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