Hi there!

Recently the ps and top commands stopped working for ordinary users.
I am not sure what caused it, but I would very much like to restore
things to normal without having to re-install RiscBSD.

The symptoms for the errors were messages like the following:

imm@nethotel:/home/imm => top   
kvm_open: /dev/mem: Permission denied

imm@nethotel:/home/imm => top
kvm_open: /dev/kmem: Permission denied

imm@nethotel:/home/imm => top
kvm_open: /dev/drum: Permission denied

What I did to circumvent the problems was to change the attributes
of the device files from

crw-------   1 root  kmem        1,   0 Mar  2 19:32 drum
crw-------   1 root  kmem        0,   1 Mar  2 19:32 kmem
crw-------   1 root  kmem        0,   0 Mar  2 19:32 mem

to

crw-r--r--   1 root  kmem        1,   0 Mar  2 19:32 drum
crw-r--r--   1 root  kmem        0,   1 Mar  2 19:32 kmem
crw-r--r--   1 root  kmem        0,   0 Mar  2 19:32 mem


The attributes of ps and top are as follows:

-r-xr-sr-x  1 bin  kmem  233472 Oct 29  1997 /bin/ps
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  40960 Nov  6  1997 /usr/local/bin/top

Is my circumvention correct or should I do something else to
fix the problems?

Regards
-- 
Ib-Michael Martinsen
Email at work: imm@kmd.dk (until 31-may-1998)
Email at home: imm@nethotel.dk
Fidomail:      2:234/181.9

Running RiscBSD v1.3a on an Acorn RiscPC with a 202.4 MHz StrongArm processor.