Hi!

I'm setting up a BBS running PCBoard under dosemu on a Linux box.
I am trying to make the system as reliable and secure as possible,
so I've tried to set it up so that dosemu is run non-suid-root as
a regular user. However, the tty locking code in ser_init.c, which
is derived from Taylor UUCP, requires dosemu to be run suid root.

As you probably can tell, using serial ports is essential for a
BBS to function. As far as I can tell, there is no way to disable
the lockfile creation code or otherwise use serial ports under a
non-suid-root dosemu session.

By browsing the code I found out that the reason that lockfile
creation requires root privileges is that the lockfile is chown'ed
to the uucp user (or whatever is set in OWNER_LOCKS or
owner_tty_locks). I don't know much about lockfiles or UUCP, but
at least minicom creates lockfiles as the user who is running it.
/var/lock is usually world-writable, so this is possible.

How about making the code such that it works as it currently does
when dosemu has root permissions, and when it runs as a user it
simply creates lockfiles as that user. dosemu could issue a
warning in this situation, it could be a separate configuration or
whatever; the main point is that it could be made to work.

As for my BBS, I have two options: either change the dosemu code
or run dosemu suid root. I haven't decided yet which one I'll
choose.

Regards,
Osma Suominen

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*** Osma Suominen *** [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** http://www.iki.fi/ozone/ ***


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