[Techtalk] wvdial, pppd, and permissions insanity- solved!!!

[Carla Schroder]

On Friday 14 October 2005 2:47 pm, Almut Behrens wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 14, 2005 at 01:19:12AM -0700, Carla Schroder wrote:
> > Nothing I do gets ordinary unprivileged users out of their homedirs- not
> > suid on pppd, nor stuffing everone into the same groups- nothing. I get
> > the same error: 'Cannot open device foo. Device or resource busy.'
> >
> > Yes, I'm sure I have the correct serial port- it works for the root user.
> >
> > All brilliant notions welcome.
>
> no brilliant notions... just a thought:  to me it seems the problem has
> to do with obtaining a lock on the device (instead of being related to
> file permissions of the device itself...).
>
> Maybe you have a stale lockfile (owned by root) or something like
> that...  You might want to check
>
> * whether you have any lock files like "/var/lock/LCK..ttyS1" -- if so
>   remove them.
>
> * whether the directory /var/lock has proper permissions -- should be
>   the same as those of /tmp, i.e.
>
> $ ls -ld /var/lock
> drwxrwxrwt    3 root     root         4096 14. Okt 07:37 /var/lock
>        ^^^
> so ordinary users are allowed to create files in there.


SHRIEK OMG you are my hero and a genius and everything. It was lockfile perms- 
on CentOS they were drwxrwxr-t. I changed 'em and now it all works it works 
it works *passes out*

-- 
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Carla Schroder
http://www.tuxcomputing.com
check out my new book, the "Linux Cookbook", the ultimate Linux user's 
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