&#%@§!! environment

[Michael Stassen]

On Mon, 19 Feb 2001, Zenon Panoussis wrote:

[snip]
> 
> Thanks a lot for your help. And BTW, it still only works with 
>   su - news -c /usr/local/news/bin/rc.news
> but not with 
>   su - news -c ./rc.news

This is to be expected.  su - news acts as if you logged in as the news
user, hence your working directory will be the news user's home directory,
presumably /usr/local/news.  You can confirm with `su - news -c pwd`.  So,
./rc.news won't be found since it's in bin.  `su - news -c bin/rc.news`
would probably work, but using the full path, as in the instructions, is
generally safer.

> or 
>   su news -c [path or not]rc.news

Without the -, su keeps your current environment, so this suggests that
your current environment (root's, I presume) differs from your news user's
environment in a way that breaks things, though I'm not sure what that
would be (shell?, path?, ...).

> 
> I guess that's a later issue :)
> 
> Z
> 

Finally, you mentioned running chown news:news on everything at one point,
but you also mentioned reinstalling everything, so I'm not sure if this is
any longer relevant, but as Russ pointed out, inndstart must be suid root,
hence root:news.  It won't work if it's news:news.

Michael Stassen
Support Center
University Information Technology Services
Indiana University Bloomington
stassenm at indiana.edu