Hi,

I was working on installing Oracle onto a Solaris 9 system today, and
ran into a very strange (to me) problem.

What happened was that we originally had created a directory called
"apps" under "/" on the hard drive and installed some of the Oracle
software. Then, we decided that the "/" filesystem was too small for
some other stuff we were going to be installing, so we uninstalled the
Oracle software, and, using Veritas Volume manager, we created a 30GB
volume.

We then mounted the Veritas volume to "/apps", and proceeded to try to
re-install the Oracle software, but we ran into problems. I struggled
with this for awhile, then found that I was getting a "getcwd:
permission denied" during the installation, but everything looked ok
permission-wise when I checked using "ls -al / |grep apps".

This happened even when I chmod'ed /apps and all the directories under
that to 777 (I got desparate ).

I kind of puzzled over this for awhile, and did some searching, and
found some posts indicating that 'sometimes', the permissions of the
mount point can cause problems.

I eventually ended up unmounting the Veritas volume, chmod'ed the
"/apps" directory, then re-mounted the Veritas volume. After that, I
tried the Oracle installation, and everything went fine.


I guess that I'm happy that I was able to get around this problem (many,
many hours), but I still am wondering about what exactly the problem
was.

I'm worried that I don't understand the problem exactly, and that it may
come up again later.


Can someone here explain this?

What exactly is going on between the permissions of the underlying mount
point vs. the permissions after the Veritas volume was mounted, i.e.,
what are the "rules"?

For example, should we always chmod the mount point to the desired
permissions before mounting a Veritas volume?

Thanks,
Jim

"ohaya" <ohaya@cox.net> wrote in message news:41A54FEB.42EFEB68@cox.net...
> Hi,
>
> I was working on installing Oracle onto a Solaris 9 system today, and
> ran into a very strange (to me) problem.
>
> What happened was that we originally had created a directory called
> "apps" under "/" on the hard drive and installed some of the Oracle
> software. Then, we decided that the "/" filesystem was too small for
> some other stuff we were going to be installing, so we uninstalled the
> Oracle software, and, using Veritas Volume manager, we created a 30GB
> volume.
>
> We then mounted the Veritas volume to "/apps", and proceeded to try to
> re-install the Oracle software, but we ran into problems. I struggled
> with this for awhile, then found that I was getting a "getcwd:
> permission denied" during the installation, but everything looked ok
> permission-wise when I checked using "ls -al / |grep apps".
>
> This happened even when I chmod'ed /apps and all the directories under
> that to 777 (I got desparate ).
>
> I kind of puzzled over this for awhile, and did some searching, and
> found some posts indicating that 'sometimes', the permissions of the
> mount point can cause problems.
>
> I eventually ended up unmounting the Veritas volume, chmod'ed the
> "/apps" directory, then re-mounted the Veritas volume. After that, I
> tried the Oracle installation, and everything went fine.
>
>
> I guess that I'm happy that I was able to get around this problem (many,
> many hours), but I still am wondering about what exactly the problem
> was.
>
> I'm worried that I don't understand the problem exactly, and that it may
> come up again later.
>
>
> Can someone here explain this?
>
> What exactly is going on between the permissions of the underlying mount
> point vs. the permissions after the Veritas volume was mounted, i.e.,
> what are the "rules"?
>

I saw this already (not under Solaris). What apparently happens is
following - when you have to cd back up out of mounted filesystem the kernel
must first find the inode for mount point (in your case for /apps on root).
And it may happen that kernel is using the same rules for checking
permissions as for "normal" files - if you do not have permissions for the
_mount_point_ itself you simply cannot do "cd .." out of mounted filesystem.

getcwd just executes "cd ..; cd ..; ..." until it hits root that is why it
complaints.

I am rather surprised Solaris have this as well. But it seems to be common
to SVR4 derivatives.

> For example, should we always chmod the mount point to the desired
> permissions before mounting a Veritas volume?
>

it has nothing to do with Veritas. Consider:

bor@itspw1% ll /tmp/x
-rw-r--r-- 1 bor sinix 108462080 Nov 15 18:07 /tmp/x
bor@itspw1% sudo mount -r -F ufs /dev/lofi/1 /tmp/x
bor@itspw1% ll /tmp/x
total 72
drwxr-xr-x 2 root sys 512 Dec 18 2001 a/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root other 9 Dec 19 2001 bin -> ./usr/bin/
....
bor@itspw1% cd /tmp/x
bor@itspw1% /bin/pwd
pwd: cannot determine current directory!

but

bor@itspw1% sudo -s
root@itspw1# cd /tmp/x
root@itspw1# /bin/pwd
/tmp/x


So yes, having at least 755 for *mount point* itself is almost a must.

regards

=arvi=

> Thanks,
> Jim