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