[NTLUG:Discuss] screwed up rights!

[Chris Cox]

Richard Geoffrion wrote:
> Slackware 8.1 w/reiserfs (No Xwindows/KDE/or Gnome)
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> I just did an ls -l in the /usr/src directory of a new server I'm building
> and I have to say that I have NO idea why the rights in this directory are
> so screwed up.  Check this out.
> 
> ['ls -l /usr/src']
> drwxr-xr-x    5 2222     2222          784 Jun 27 17:36 Net_SSLeay.pm-1.17/
> drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root          224 Jun 28 00:43 autorespond-2.0.2/
> drwxrwxrwx   23 richard  users        2792 Jul  1 13:26 courier-imap-1.5.1/
> drwxr-xr-x    5 root     bin         19160 Jun 28 13:40 ezmlm-0.53/
...rest snipped...

> Who the heck is user and group 2222!  It's not in my /etc/passwd file!
> 
> All of these source code directories were extracted using the command
> 'tar -zxvf /usr/download/example.gz'
> 
> Does THAT have anything to do with it?   How SHOULD I be extracting files?
> Do I need to do anything to fix the current rights? (chown -R root:root
> /usr/src; chown -R richard:users /usr/src/courier-imap-1.5.1)

Two likely causes...

1. The most likely cause, the packages were copied/unpackaged as root, root
will preserve the permission bits, including the uid/gid of the package
being unarchived (untar'd).

2. Sometimes you'll see this when you delete a user... since the user
no longer exists on the system, the system can only show the uid number
for the files previously associated with the deleted username.

In general, it's not a huge problem.  You can either unpackage things
as your normal id (richard)... or you can change the permissions after
unpackaging things with a recursive chown... either way is probably
fine.  Shoot, I'll admit, I usually don't fix it at all.... however,
it can lead to certain security issues.