File permissions suddenly change for /dev/null.

[Ed Alley]

On Tue, 2 Sep 2003, Ed Alley wrote:
>
>> I'm running FreeBSD-4.8. Sometimes the file permissions for /dev/null
>> gets mysteriously changed by some unknown process to:
>>
>>    crw------- 1 root wheel 2, 2 Sep 2 11:20 /dev/null

On Tue, 2 Sep 2003, David Landgren wrote:

>> ..., the moral of the story is, what have you installed recently?

On Tue, 2 Sep 2003, Matthew Seaman wrote:

>> ... It would have to be a root-owned process ...

On Tue, 2 Sep 2003, Scott Kupferschmidt wrote:

>> I had the same problem and still unable to figure it out..

I thankyou all for the above comments. They were helpful to
me in finding the problem: When I thought about it for a
time I realized that it happens on days that I was doing
administrative work as ROOT!

	It was NETSCAPE! running under root. It turns out that
I periodically tweak our router via Netscape. If I happen to
be logged in as root on my FreeBSD terminal when I log into
the router with Netscape, then after I'm finished with my
work and close Netscape, I find that the permissions on
/dev/null have been reset to: crw-------.
	I'm running Netscape-4.76. I also have a late
version of Mozilla installed which doesn't seem to
mangle the file permissions on /dev/null the way Netscape
does. I also don't need to be logged in as root when I
run Netscape to tweak the router, it just happens that
when I'm doing other administrative stuff I think to
look at the router also. (:->)

			Ed Alley
			wea at llnl.gov