/dev/null permission issues

[Stephen Hilton]

On Sat, 13 Sep 2003 14:47:23 -0400 (EDT)
Scott Kupferschmidt <sk at isprime.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I know I've sent in once before regarding, but no one has seemed to know
> how to fix this issue.  It seems when I install boxes with 4.8-rel cd the
> /dev/null changes permission every minute to non-writable by any user,
> breaking a lot of scripts piping output to /dev/null.  Anytime I try chmod
> 666 it, within the next clock minute, it's back to 644.
> 
> I've tried rebuilding the device completely, cvsup'ing to a newer version
> (4.9-pre), nothing seems to fix it and it only seemed to happen on
> machines that I originally installed with 4.8-rel.  If anyone has some
> insight on this issue, it would be greatly appreciated as I am pulling
> hair trying to figure out this problem.

Scott,

>From a previous thread:

-------------------snip---------------------
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
-------------------snip---------------------

You did not mention running Netscape 4.67 as root, but I thought 
I would throw this out here, in case it is relevent.


Regards,


Stephen Hilton
nospam at hiltonbsd.com