Subject: Re: Permission problems
To: Colin Wood <ender@is.rice.edu>
From: Bill Studenmund <wrstuden@loki.stanford.edu>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 03/31/1997 09:37:12
>
> > Last week I compiled ghostscript 3.33 and Monroe Williams' StyleWriter
> > driver and finally got my system to print. Unfortunately, while doing
> > so, I ran out of drive space, and even though it printed a few times,
> > eventually I kept getting messages that said something to the tune of,
> > "could not write...drie full." I had quit trying to print, but I would
> > get these messages even when logging off. So, I rm'd my games and some
> > other space hogs. I also rebooted for some reason or another, and during
> > the reboot, I got a core dump due to a segmentation error. I rebooted
> > again into single-user and did a disk check. Then I rebooted into
> > multi-user. Now whenever I boot I get these messages:
> >
> > starting rpc daemons: portmapportmap: permission denied
> >
> > ...then a few lines down...
> >
> > quotaon: permission denied
>
> Probably filesystem corruption...
I'd second that opinion.
> > Also, shortly after I log in, either as myself (using bash) or as root
> > (using csh), I get spurious messages timed at about two minute intervals
> > for the first six minutes or so of the log in. The latest set of these
> > messages read:
[weird error messages snipped]
> > I have dug through the "Red Book" and the man pages for portmap and
> > pmap_set, as well as an O'Reilly book "Essential System Administration".
> > I think I may be dealing with a permissions problem, but I don't know
> > why. If I do a "ls -alF" on portmap and quotaon it shows:
> >
> > br-S--S--- 256 768 1792 232, 0 Mar 31 11:56 portmap
> > br-S--S--- 512 768 1792 176, 0 Jul 13 10:42 quotaon
> >
> > (portmap's date is different because I "touch"'d it.)
> >
> > I read through the "Red Book's" explanation of the setuid and sticky
> > bits, but I really don't know if that applies here. I have also tried to
> > set the permissions on both of these files by using "chmod ug+s
> > ./portmap", but that didn't seem to work.
>
> Ah, the problem is that these files have become corrupted. Are you using
> the ncrscsi driver on an '030-based Mac? If so, you might consider
> changing to the SBC driver instead. If you'll notice, the 'b' in the
> first column above indicates that these files are now block special files
> (i.e. block device interfaces), not very useful as executables ;-)
> You'll need to reinstall the base distribution to fix this.
I'm not sure if the ncr driver was the source of the problems, but you
should re-install to fix things. Weird stuff can happen when the
file system gets totally full. It's not supposed to, but does.
Take care,
Bill