/dev/null permission issues

Scott Kupferschmidt sk at isprime.com
Sat Sep 13 13:23:54 PDT 2003


Hello,

We are not running X, this is a server it is happening on.  The only thing
running is apache, mysql, sendmail, inetd (proftpd), and that's about
it.  I find it odd that this is only happening on boxes we installed with
4.8-rel and not any other revision.  I manage over 300 machines daily and
have seen this recently.

Sincerely,

Scott Kupferschmidt
ISPrime, Inc.
866.502.4678 ext. 3
AIM: Scott ISPrime - ICQ: 174337249

On Sat, 13 Sep 2003, Stephen Hilton wrote:

> 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
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