[Techtalk] something is changing /home permissions automatically?

[Malcolm-Rannirl]

On Monday 31 Mar 2003 5:43 pm, Jenny Brown wrote:

> I'm working on a Mandrake box where I'm one of two sysadmins, it's a low

Which release? The following only applies to some versions of Mandrake.

> usage box, and I'm finding that something is forcing /home to be
> chmod 711 every few hours.  I can set a person's home directory
> readable (755) but then a few hours later it's set back, and not due to
> that individual user or due to the other admin.

That sounds like a rampant case of msec. (Mandrake's security scanner). 
Depending on what settings it's got, it either wanders around and lets you 
know what has unsafe permissions, or resets them all for you. Whomever 
installed the box should be able to tell you what security level they asked 
for (though they might not know about this particular side effect of that 
install question).

> There are no crons listed in root's crontab.  /home is an ext3

As far as I know, msec doesn't show up in the crontab file. Check the entries 
in /etc/cron*, there's probably something in /etc/cron.hourly.