At 08:26 PM 5/30/00 +0000, Richard Adams wrote [in part]:
>I also hope that i am not poking my nose in where it is possably not wanted.
Don't be silly, Richard. This is in good part why I try to keep these
discussions on the list ... so that someone else (you, Lawson, Greg, others)
can fill in details I don't know or miss (or occasionally get flat-out
wrong). This QC role is an important part of what makes a list like
linux-newbie valuable.
The problem with figuring out whether permissions are right is that there
are many choices that can be "right" as long as permisisons for other things
are consistent. In the case at hand, lpr and lpd don't need to run suid if
/dev/lp0, all the /var/spool/lp*/* files, and whatever filters are being
used are all mode 666.
But if some of them are mode 644 (as /dev/lp0 often is), then lpr or lpd
needs to be suid or sgid to access the device. This is how Debian does it,
and, from what you write, apparently Slackware and RH as well. Of course, in
this scenario, an unpriveleged user can't do (for example) "cat somefile
>/dev/lp0", hbecause he can't access the device. I assume this is why Ted
changed /dev/lp0 to 666; he just inadvertantly changed its ownership at the
same time. No big deal, unless he's on a system with a lot of users where
restricting access to the lp0 device actually matters.
The changes of ownership of lpd, to:
-rwxr--r-- 1 ve1drg lp 41836 Apr 5 1999 lpd*
may matter more; only ve1drg (and root, of course) can run this program, and
since it isn't setuid or setgid, it might be unable to access, for example,
the spool directory. Not sure here, cause I don't quite see how lpr and lpd
interact given this state of aaffairs.
As to vger, it seems a bit slow today, but not extraordinarily so. I just
checked a message Lawson posted, and vger introduced about 45 minutes of
delay, and the .fi relay it uses to mail to me no more than 5 minutes more.
You might see if your Received: headers give you anything in the way of
clues about the source of your problem.
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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