&#%@§!! environment

[Zenon Panoussis]

OK, this is driving me nuts. It probably has less to do with INN 
itself and more with something in the system configuration. But 
that, in turn, is practically standard out-of-the-box.

I installed INN from the 2.3.1 tarball on an RH-7.0 system. 
Did it by the book - I think. Created the news user and group, 
run configure, make, make install as root, configured most 
things and tried to start with su news -c ./rc.news . No go, 
the answer is 
  bash: /root/.bashrc: Permission denied
  Starting innd.
and the syslog says
  PAM_unix[3692]: (system-auth) session opened for user news by
root(uid=0)
  inndstart: can't setgroups: Operation not permitted
  inndstart: seteuid(0) failed: Operation not permitted
  PAM_unix[3692]: (system-auth) session closed for user news

Huh? Why would INN attempt to read /root/.bashrc? Perhaps the way 
I created the "news" user? It dosn't seem logical to me; I did 
  groupadd -u 13 news
  useradd -d /usr/local/news -g news -m -u 9 news
and no skeleton files have ever been changed. 

Anyway, I deleted the "news" user and group and tried again the 
simpler way:
  useradd -r news   
(RH creates the group by itself) and chowned all INN files back 
to news:news . Still no go. Deleted all /usr/local/news/.something 
files too. That didn't help either.

So I tried 
  strace -v -f 'su news -c ./rc.news' 
Here's some interesting output (it's all one line, cut to fit mail 
lines):

  2126  execve("/usr/local/news/bin/innconfval", 
  ["/usr/local/news/bin/innconfval", "-s"], 
  ["PWD=/root", "HOSTNAME=goat.freewinds.cx", 
  "CLASSPATH=/usr/local/jaxp1.0.1", 
  "LESSOPEN=|/usr/bin/lesspipe.sh %"..., "USER=news", 
  "LS_COLORS=no=00:fi=00:di=01;34:l"..., 
  "MACHTYPE=i386-redhat-linux-gnu", "JAKARTA_HOME=/usr/local/jakarta", 
  "MAIL=/var/spool/mail/root", "INPUTRC=/etc/inputrc", 
  "BASH_ENV=/root/.bashrc", "LANG=en_US", "JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/jdk1.3", 
  "LOGNAME=news", "SHLVL=7", "_=/usr/local/news/bin/innconfval"..., 
  "SHELL=/bin/bash", "USERNAME=root", "HOSTTYPE=i386", 
  "OSTYPE=linux-gnu", "HISTSIZE=1000", "HOME=/usr/local/news", 
  "TERM=vt100", "PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/"..., 
  "SSH_TTY=/dev/pts/0"]) = 0

Now, where did innconfval get root's environment from, why is it 
trying to run with it and, what's most important, HTF do I get rid 
of this? 

All and any ideas will be much appreciated.

Z


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