Subject: The solution! (re: 'dir' hangs...)

From: "David G. Mills" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 09 Feb 1998 09:31:50 -0800

Good morning! (or whatever time reference is appropriate!)

I have stumbled across the cause of the mysterious "'dir' hangs my client's
output" problem.
(recap: running 2.4.2 beta 15 on Solaris 2.5.1, everything peachy-keen
until I started editing the ~ftp/etc/passwd file, then client ftp output
hung on the 'dir' command).

Embarassing, but true: I had 'cp'-ed the real /etc/passwd file into
~ftp/etc/ as root, but the umask for root was 137, so my new
~ftp/etc/passwd file had permissions of "-rw-r-----"....

Apparently the ftpd process couldn't read the passwd file! (I'm a little
confused, since the ftpd process runs under the root UID, I would have
thought this wouldn't have been an issue. On the other hand, I understand
that there's a switch from UID 0 to a generic system process UID, right?)

Well, in any case, setting the permissions to world-read on the file
cleared things up right away.

thanks for everyone's kind remarks and suggestions!

david
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
David G. Mills / System Administrator

         IPAC Systems Group
       Caltech, Pasadena, CA

       [email-masked]
            626-397-7241