Re: MiNTOS Release 1.4 now available.

[knarf@nasim.cube.net (Frank Bartels)]

Stephen Usher wrote:

> >Hmm, I can't see the message from syslogd that I tried to login as
> >root. The violation has to be there before (or while?) login sends his
> >message to syslogd.
> 
> As I said before, I think it's probably due to an incompatible password
> entry in /etc/passwd, the current passwd (as of MiNTOS 1.4) will not produce
> incompatible salts.

root has no password at all, so this cannot be the point. It does not
work with a passwd, too.

But I reduced my /etc/passwd to these two lines:

root::0:0:Operator:/home/root:/bin/tcsh
toor::0:0:Operator:/home/root:/bin/tcsh

Login as root does not work, but toor works. This could be a solution for
a while, but there are some stupid programs who look for the username
instead of the uid.

Again, I think the problem has something to do with syslogd, because
the login as toor wouldn't be noticed. As I never had to change any
syslog-configuration, I've no idea how to continue.

[A while later...]

Argh! After using MiNT's debugging function, I found my problem. I
while ago, I created a 0 byte file /var/spool/mail/root (for security
reasons). After opening this file, an exception #10 (Bus Error) occured.
I removed this file and everything worked fine!

Now some other qestions: What home-directory do *you* use for root?
There are several solutions:

/home/root  Works fine, but looks ugly and will cause problems in the
            future, if we are mounting filesystems manually.
u:/         The best place, but since we cannot write there, it will
            cause problems, if a new shell wants to create its
            .history or whatever. Sure, we can create symbolic links
            to /home/root or wherever, but this should not be the
            final solution.
[c-p]:/     If you link u:/dev and all the other important directories
            to your "root"-partition, you are able to write in / and
            you also are able to have real permissions in / and you
            nevermore have to use "sln" commands in your mint.cnf.
            With UNIXMODE set to r[C-P], there should be no problems.

> I don't think it's getting that far. If only MiNT could dump core so broken
> programs could be debugged.

A real core dump would be fine, but MiNT's internal debug function can
help a lot, too. But what I'm missing is the output to a file
(console.ttp could do this, but with memory protection it crashes all
the time, and debug level 2 or higher slows the machine down to zero).

Bye,
Knarf
-- 
    Frank Bartels    |      UUCP/ZModem: + 49 89 5469593       | MiNT is
knarf@nasim.cube.net | Login: nuucp Index: /pub/ls-lR.nasim.gz | Now TOS!