Subject: Permission denied on .pinerc

From: Cathy Boll <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 08 Jul 1998 14:11:04 -0500

I hope that you can help me.  I am in the process of moving Pine 3.96 from
a Digital Ultrix V4.4 system to a Digital Unix 4.0D system.  

When one of the users logs on, he gets the message "Error saving
configuration in file /usr/users/username/.pinerc permission denied".  I
have the same permissions on my own .pinerc file and my works just fine.
What could be causing this?

He also gets the message "Note: some of your config options conflict with
site policy and are ignored".  I am prompted to investigate when I attempt
to configure the setup.  The two offending options are: addrbook-sort-rule
and enable-suspend.  When I try to change these, I get the message "can't
change sys-admin defined value".  Please note that I copied his .pinerc
file from the old system to the new and he has a number of changes from the
supplied default.  

I have only started testing on the new machine with a few users and I am
very concerned if I cannot bring the users old .pinerc files to the new
system.

Thanks for your help.

Cathy Boll

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From: Joe DiBenedetto <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 8 Jul 1998 16:18:59 -0400 (EDT)

Cathy,

It could be that the directory where the .pinerc lives has insufficient
write permissions.  Check this by typing:

cd /usr/users/username
ls -ld .

You should get a listing that looks something like:

drwxrwxrwx	18	root	other	20480	Jul 8 10:51 .

If any of the w's are missing, that's you're problem.  If not, it could
be that the username or id # is different on the new system, which would
disallow the user from updating the .pinerc file.  Make sure you assign
the same id #s to each user on the new system.

As for the message regarding site policy, that is being caused by the
presence of a pine.conf file in /usr/local/pine or whatever the equivalent
directory is on your Digital Unix system.  This file overrides whatever
is in the users .pinerc file.

Joe DiBenedetto

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From: Timothy J Luoma <luomat+Lists/Unix/[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 8 Jul 1998 16:36:35 -0400

Author:	Cathy Boll <[email-masked]>
	Date:	Wed, 08 Jul 1998 14:11:04 -0500
	ID:	<[email-masked]>

> What could be causing this?

What about the permissions of the parent directory?

Have you tried a different pinerc file using the -p flag?

> file from the old system to the new and he has a number of changes from the

Sounds like you have a /usr/local/lib/pine.conf.fixed file on this new system

I know what 'enable-suspend' might be sorted off, but 'addrbook-sort-rule'  
shouldn't be set by the administrators.

TjL

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From: Edan Idzerda <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 8 Jul 1998 16:46:01 -0400 (EDT)

> If any of the w's are missing, that's you're problem.  If not, it could

Err?  Since when did any normal user's directory need to allow full 
write permission to everyone on the system?

I think a better example would be:

% ls -ld ~                                                                            0
drwx--x--x  46 edan     other      12288 Jul  8 16:43 /home/blah/edan/

If THAT 'w' is missing, then that's the problem, but that seems 
too easy.

I would be interested in what happens if you do

% cd
% touch afile
% pico afile  (write some stuff, quit)

If that doesn't work, then this isn't a pine problem.

- edan

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From: Joe DiBenedetto <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 8 Jul 1998 17:10:31 -0400 (EDT)

OK, you got me.  It's been a long day...

Joe

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From: Cathy Boll <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 09 Jul 1998 08:21:11 -0500

Thank you to everyone who answered this request for help.  The .pinerc
problem was indeed caused by improper ownership of the /usr/users/username
directory and not down at the file level. 

The config problem is also resolved.  The user had an old .pinerc file that
used options that conflicted with the pine.conf file.

Again, thanks for your help.

Cathy Boll