mysteries_permission_changes

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Subject: Group writeable home directory
From: Dirk Laurie <dirk@calvyn.puk.ac.za>
Date: Thu, 4 Nov 1999 11:41:01 +0200 (SAST)

The cure to a problem I had with Lynx being unable to open my bookmark
file was that my home directory was not group writeable.  I changed that,
but now run into a worse problem:

[extract from /var/log/maillog]

Nov  4 09:53:04 calvyn sendmail[10827]: JAA10826: forward /home/dirk/.forward: G
roup writable directory
Nov  4 09:53:04 calvyn procmail[10828]: Suspicious rcfile "/home/dirk/.procmailr
c"

So I change my home directory back to permissions 751, because 
procmail is more important to me than lynx.  Now surprise, lynx
can still save bookmarks, and in the meanwhile the permissions
on the bookmark file have changed to 

-rw-r--r--   1 dirk     500           742 Nov  4 11:28 lynx_bookmarks.html

This is the file lynx created for itself.  500 is a deleted user number.  
I've given up trying to understand what has happened (the system goes
back to RedHat 2.0, and one or two upgrades along the way needed to be
made as "new installations" with /etc/passwd and /etc/group restored
from backups of the old system) but since it ain't broken now, I'm not
going to try to fix it.

===





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