On Tue, Apr 09, 2002 at 04:42:52PM -0700, Terry Lambert wrote:
> Julian Elischer wrote:
> > As terry knows of course, the Interjet
> > had the following /etc/symlinks: (excuse linewrap)
> > lrwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 20 Mr 28 2001 crontab@ ->
> > /writable/system/crontab
> > lrwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 18 Mr 28 2001 group@ ->
> > /writable/system/group
>
> [ ... ]
>
> > the single root+usr partition is mounted read-only.
>
> Yes, but appealing to a product I had something to do with,
> even if that organization wasn't mine in particular, makes
> a much less powerful argument.
>
> The other thing that's a bit painful about that argument
> is that the symlinks failed to operate as expected for
> the master.passwd, if the / was mounted read/write. I
> count this as a bug in the password database generation
> code, but it should be noted that it can be a problem (e.g
> the symlink is renamed to the backup, and the replacement
> file is created in /etc; it does the right thing, if the
> symlink is read-only, though...).
Exactly, you can't use symlinks with the passwd(1) and pwd_mkdb(8)
commands as they stand. The commands will bail when they try to create
a temporary file in /etc, /etc/pw.XXXXXX if /etc is read-only. If
/etc is not read-only, the symlinks will get removed and the files
actually written in /etc.
--
Crist J. Clark | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
| [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://people.freebsd.org/~cjc/ | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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