[Sheflug] Permissions/WvDial

[Harvey Kelly <nospam [at] kelly.uklinux.net>]

Hello Martin,

On Fri, 16 Jun 2000, Martin P Holland wrote:

> On Fri, 16 Jun 2000, Harvey Kelly wrote:
> 
> >Now the only problem is... after "Carrier detected" it tells me that it
> >couldn't modify /etc/ppp/pap-secrets nor /etc/ppp/chap-secrets, permission
> >was denied, and that both PAP and CHAP may be flaky.
> 
> Well that's good really it means a program running under your userid can't
> modify files owned by root with 600 permissions. ;-)> 

Ah, that makes sense.  No, that sounded really sarcastic - I mean I
understand the logic there.

> >Is this okay/normal?  I've dialled-up about ten times this morning already
> >trying to test it, and it seems okay.  Is it just as stable as normal?
> 
> Yes it's fine. I'm not very familiar with wvdial but as I understand it the way
> it works is that it looks out for key words like CHAP MD5 in /var/log/messages
> and tries to decide on the fly what authentication you need to use. It will then
> write the appropriate secrets file accordingly. In your case (when you ran it as
> root) it already wrote the secrets file, so there's no need to write it again.
> 
> It might complain a bit that your not giving it a chance to do it's thing but
> once the secrets file is correct it can do everything else as a user.

Thanks for helping with this one.  I should read up on ownerships and
permissions as I just blinder my way through hoping not to screw too many
things up. 

> atb
> 
> Martin

Now, you have to remember that I've only owned a computer for less than a
year, but what does "atb" mean?  I'm a bit useless with all this
techie-shorthand stuff.

Thanks again

Harvey


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