🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1995Jul22.141819.9170@dcs.warwick.ac.uk> J.C.Doran@dcs.warwick.ac.uk (Farthing W. Fox) writes:

> Somewhere along the line in my re-setting up of my linux box, I guess I am
> missing something, for I cannot seem to manage to post news at all.
> I just get the error:
> newsspool: renouncing setuid due to nonstandard `NEWSPATH' in environment
> newsspool: unable to create temporary `/var/spool/news/in.coming/nspool.a01020' (Permission denied)
> /usr/lib/newsbin/inject/injnews: article in /home/fox/dead.article
> /usr/bin/inews failed

Some of the executables that make up CNews check that the NEWSPATH
that they were built with match the NEWSPATH in the file
/var/lib/news/bin/config.  This is a security feature.

Unfortunately in the Slackware 2.2.0 distribution the NEWSPATH that
the executable /usr/lib/newsbin/input/newsspool was built with is:

 /bin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin  

whereas the NEWSPATH in the config file is:

 /bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin

This causes the newsspool program to output the error that you are
seeing as it sulks that the path is not correct and renounces its
setuid priviledge.

You can't just edit the path in the config file because the executable
/usr/lib/newsbin/relay/relaynews has been built with the correct path
so modifying the config file will just cause a problem here instead.

What you really need to do is rebuild CNews from scratch.

Alteratively you could do what I did - I simply patched the newsspool
executable with a hex editor to contain the correct path.  This is
dead easy as the paths are the same size and you only need to change a
few bytes.  This hack has been working fine for me for a couple of
weeks with no problems at all.

--
Paul Thomas