Hey,

I recently changed my user name on my machine so that I could ssh to the
suns at my university.

The only problem with this is that for some strange reason, my old user name
owned a whole bunch of files in /dev/. So, I changed the ownership of all
files in dev to root. The only problem with this is that now I don't have
access to some important devices, such as dsp. chmod 666 fixed that.

My question now becomes: is it safe to have read write access for all users,
or should I change it? I saw that some files in dev have some unique
groups to which no one belongs, such as lp and disk. Should I make a new
group, or maybe change the group to which dsp belongs to users and chmod
660? To tell you the truth, I don't know what the hell to do, and I don't
know why the files in dev were owend by someone other than root.

I hope I'm not off topic, my appoligies if I am.

Thanks for your help
James Leddy

James Leddy wrote:
> Hey,
>
> I recently changed my user name on my machine so that I could ssh to the
> suns at my university.
>
> The only problem with this is that for some strange reason, my old user name
> owned a whole bunch of files in /dev/. So, I changed the ownership of all
> files in dev to root. The only problem with this is that now I don't have
> access to some important devices, such as dsp. chmod 666 fixed that.
>
> My question now becomes: is it safe to have read write access for all users,
> or should I change it? I saw that some files in dev have some unique
> groups to which no one belongs, such as lp and disk. Should I make a new
> group, or maybe change the group to which dsp belongs to users and chmod
> 660? To tell you the truth, I don't know what the hell to do, and I don't
> know why the files in dev were owend by someone other than root.
>
> I hope I'm not off topic, my appoligies if I am.
>
> Thanks for your help
> James Leddy
>
>
>
>
James,
I remember a command I saw at www.redhat.com/docs that changed
permissions back to 'original'settings per partition. Sorry cann't
help more than that.

david

James Leddy wrote:
> Hey,
>
> I recently changed my user name on my machine so that I could ssh to the
> suns at my university.
>
> The only problem with this is that for some strange reason, my old user name
> owned a whole bunch of files in /dev/. So, I changed the ownership of all
> files in dev to root. The only problem with this is that now I don't have
> access to some important devices, such as dsp. chmod 666 fixed that.
>
> My question now becomes: is it safe to have read write access for all users,
> or should I change it? I saw that some files in dev have some unique
> groups to which no one belongs, such as lp and disk. Should I make a new
> group, or maybe change the group to which dsp belongs to users and chmod
> 660? To tell you the truth, I don't know what the hell to do, and I don't
> know why the files in dev were owend by someone other than root.
>
> I hope I'm not off topic, my appoligies if I am.
>
> Thanks for your help
> James Leddy
>

Maybe you could switch back to your previous username?
I'm not clear why changed it in the first place? Didn't the '-l' flag
work with ssh? (ssh -l loginname machine.edu)

--

Mauriat (www.mjmwired.net)
----------------------------
Remove 'NOSPAM' to email me.

James Leddy wrote:
> Hey,
>
> I recently changed my user name on my machine so that I could ssh to
> the suns at my university.
>
> The only problem with this is that for some strange reason, my old
> user name owned a whole bunch of files in /dev/.

Did you just change the username in /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, and
/etc/group, /etc/gshadow? I hope that is all you did. If you gave
yourself a new login id (and, implicitly a new UID), then of course all
the files will belong to the old UID.

> So, I changed the ownership of all files in dev to root. The only
> problem with this is that now I don't have access to some important
> devices, such as dsp. chmod 666 fixed that.

Groan.
>
> My question now becomes: is it safe to have read write access for all
> users, or should I change it? I saw that some files in dev have some
> unique groups to which no one belongs, such as lp and disk. Should I
> make a new group, or maybe change the group to which dsp belongs to
> users and chmod 660? To tell you the truth, I don't know what the
> hell to do, and I don't know why the files in dev were owend by
> someone other than root.
>
> I hope I'm not off topic, my appoligies if I am.
>
Why not fix them by doing rpm -Uvh dev-whatnot on your distribution
disk. That should get the permissions back where they should be. You
will probably need to set some flags to rpm, because they are already there.

--
.~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642.
/V\ Registered Machine 73926.
/( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org
^^-^^ 8:55am up 12 days, 19:08, 2 users, load average: 2.25, 2.19, 2.07

On Tue, 21 Oct 2003 09:03:02 -0400,
Jean-David Beyer <j@d.b> wrote:


>Why not fix them by doing rpm -Uvh dev-whatnot on your distribution
>disk. That should get the permissions back where they should be. You
>will probably need to set some flags to rpm, because they are already there.
>


Anobody ever tried "rpm -a --setugids --setperms"


Villy

Villy Kruse wrote:
> On Tue, 21 Oct 2003 09:03:02 -0400,
> Jean-David Beyer <j@d.b> wrote:
>
>
>
>>Why not fix them by doing rpm -Uvh dev-whatnot on your distribution
>>disk. That should get the permissions back where they should be. You
>>will probably need to set some flags to rpm, because they are already there.
>>
>
>
>
> Anobody ever tried "rpm -a --setugids --setperms"
>
>
> Villy

Sorry, I must have been too succint. Something more like this:

rpm -i dev-3.3.4

(on my system at the moment).


--
.~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642.
/V\ Registered Machine 73926.
/( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org
^^-^^ 4:25pm up 13 days, 2:38, 2 users, load average: 1.20, 1.18, 1.20