files' owner changes on its own

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5 total messages Started by Mark Adler Thu, 08 Oct 1992 16:01

#1328

Author: Mark Adler
Date: Thu, 08 Oct 1992 16:01

8 lines
718 bytes

I created an ftp account (for anonymous ftp), and used chown (as root) to
change the owners of various directories and files.  However, after a
while (a few hours?) the owners change to "me" on their own!  Does
anyone know what in the system could be doing this, and why?  Thanks.

Mark Adler
madler@cco.caltech.edu

Re: files' owner changes on its own

#1345

Author: Mark Adler
Date: Thu, 08 Oct 1992 20:35

23 lines
1279 bytes

I wrote:

====
I created an ftp account (for anonymous ftp), and used chown (as root) to
change the owners of various directories and files.  However, after a
while (a few hours?) the owners change to "me" on their own!  Does
anyone know what in the system could be doing this, and why?  Thanks.
====

And I should add to that that this is not an auto-mounted external
drive.  It is an external drive mounted by an entry in fstab.  Also,
not all the files get their owner changed to "me"--only some.  I also
noticed an owner get changed from "ftp" to "zipper" (another user
name).  This is really rather mysterious.

Also, the time scale above of "a few hours" is really more like "a few
minutes".

Thanks again for any clues on this.

Mark Adler
madler@cco.caltech.edu

Re: files' owner changes on its own

#1352

Author: Mark Adler
Date: Thu, 08 Oct 1992 22:57

8 lines
760 bytes

Some more information on my phantom-owner-changer: it appears to start
at the leaves of the directory, and and then the next level down, at
10 minute intervals (on the 10 minute mark).  Nothing in crontab looks
like it could be the culprit.

Mark Adler
madler@cco.caltech.edu

Nextmail

#1375

Author: Kenneth G. Pote
Date: Fri, 09 Oct 1992 13:49

5 lines
675 bytes

I have had a problem with the Next Mail.app. If I try to launch the app, 
it gives the fatal error message: Invalid Mail Directory :Is. How do I fix
this?

-Ken

Re: files' owner changes on its own (fixed, I think)

#1391

Author: Mark Adler
Date: Fri, 09 Oct 1992 17:47

14 lines
1172 bytes

It appears that I have fixed my spontaneous-owner-changing problem.
I did too many things to be sure what fixed it, but I believe the
crux of the solution was to change the hostname on the external
disk label to match the hostname of the computer.  I suspect that
the operating system did not "trust" an external drive with a
different hostname in the label, and so would make the owners of
the files something less threatening than root.  It might have also
been important to make the owner of the drive also be root.  It was
definitely essential that the drive be dismounted and then mounted
again.

Mark Adler
madler@cco.caltech.edu

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