Subject: Problem: Can't Write to Folders

From: morris@geni34 (Morris Berman)
Date: Fri, 2 Jun 1995 11:35:38 GMT

I just returned from 2 weeks of vacation to find my Pine working 
improperly.  Somehow my "sent-mail" folder got marked as read-only and I 
can't write anything to it.  It gives a "[Can't open append folder: 
Permission denied]" error when it tries to write it as the FCC folder and 
also "[Can't open append folder: Permission denied]" error when I try to 
copy a message into it.  When I go into that folder it doesn't tell me 
that it's READONLY.  I've tried deleting the folder and then recreating 
it all with no effect.  I can't save any message to any folder, I get an 
"[Can't open destination folder: Permission denied]" error each time.  
I've also gotten a "[Append not valid for file]" for some folders that 
I've tried to save to.  The permissions on all folders are set to 600, 
and I've tried t changing that to 777 with no effect.  In addition, the 
directory has permissions 750. 

When I ran a session and just tried to save a message into a folder 
"junk", I got the following in the pine-debug file:
so_get error: /usr/users/geni21_users/morris/mail/junk : Permission denied

I'm really confused and would like to fix this problem.  If anyone can 
give me any helpful advice, please do.  I am at a loss of where to go 
from here.  

thanks,

--
-Mb

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Morris Berman, [email-masked], http://lamp0.arl.mil:8080/~morris 
           MSB, PFD, WTD, ARL <-- Obviously a Government Employee
        Yamaha XJ550M (DoD #1237), Scuba, Skiing, AMA (R/C) #481896 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
        If your reply bounces...Please reply to [email-masked]
           -=-=-=-=-=> PGP Key Available Upon Request <=-=-=-=-=-

---

From: [email-masked] (Trey Harris)
Date: 4 Jun 1995 03:44:24 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
Morris Berman <morris@geni34> wrote:
>copy a message into it.

[Morris, your email address is degenerate and cannot be replied to.  You
should have your system administrator check into the reasons why, because
it is considered bad netiquette to post without a replyable email
address.]

It strongly sounds as if all your files have changed ownership while you 
were away.  You should have your system administrator check to be sure 
that the ownership hasn't changed.

Why would this happen?  Well, there are some buggy filesystems out there
I've seen where ownership can change for no good reason.  More likely,
however, is an error on the part of your system administrator.  When we
make ownership mistakes, it's something we're likely to never notice until
the user complains, since we almost always do such work as the superuser,
who can touch files regardless of permission and ownership. 
-- 
Trey Harris                              http://sunsite.unc.edu/harris
  System Administrator, Project Isis, Office of Information Technology
                       The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill