How did I Break ssh?

[Martin McCormick]

	This is Martin McCormick again.  I haven't yet fixed my
problem with ssh not being able to write in my home directory,
but I am hot on the trail.  I have another question, but first I
will tell all of you what I found out so anybody else who wants
to try the same thing will know what to expect.

	As I originally said, I started out with a minimal
installation of FreeBSD and then extracted a tar ball made from
the root drive of another system to fill out the installation.

	My problem of not being able to get ssh to write new host
keys in to ~/.ssh/known_hosts was obviously a permission problem,
but what could it be?

	I finally found that the symbolic link between /home and
/usr/home on the two cloned systems had the mode of 755 or
rwxr-xr-x.  Any link one normally makes has these permissions
with the default umask controlling exactly what one gets.

	The man page for chmod says that the -H option lets you
change the link's permissions, but I could never get it to work.
The bits seem to stay the same no matter what.

	I discovered that I could delete the link, set my umask
to 0 and remake it and I did get the right permissions which for
the /home link are 777.

	This did not fix the problem, but I think there is
probably another link I haven't noticed yet that is set wrong.

	What I found out is that the extraction process did not
restore any of the links whose bits were all 1's.  On one FreeBSD
system, I have over 700 rwxrwxrwx links.  On the cloned system I
am trying to fix, I found only 5 and those were ones I had
manually reset.

	My question is whether there is an easier way to set the
bits on a link than deleting it, setting the umask to 0 and
remaking it, of course, hoping that I don't botch the new
link.:-)  chmod -H 777 existing_link has no effect.

	Is there a proper way to do the tar extraction that
faithfully preserves all the permissions?  This is a mess, but at
least I know what is most likely wrong now.