&#%@§!! environment

Zenon Panoussis oracle at xs4all.nl
Mon Feb 19 17:58:02 UTC 2001




Michael Stassen skrev:
> 

> > 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.

Yet another example of my poor understanding of what I'm doing :(
 

> > 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?, ...).

In that case, yesterday makes sense. That must be why it was trying 
to read /root/.bashrc . Again, some better understanding of the OS 
wouldn't do me any harm. 

  
> 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.

I re-installed everything from scratch and it worked in default. 
Then I went on putting back my configuration, one thing at a 
time, starting and stopping innd every time. It kept working. 
I just finished putting back everything it is still working, so 
I was beginning to wonder WTF. This explains it. 

Grr. As I said, I've got some basics to figure. Thanks to all 
of you guys, you put me on the right track. 

Z


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