Bug#240231: tetex-bin: mktextfm fails to create font

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Gianluca Della Vedova <gianluca.dellavedova@unimib.it> wrote:

>> It shouldn't fail, because in /var/cache/fonts everybody should have
>> write permissions (with sticky bit set). But you say that even for root
>> it fails. Please give us the output of
>> 
>>  ls -ld /var/
>>  ls -ld /var/cache/
>>  ls -ld /var/cache/fonts/
>>  ls -ld /var/cache/fonts/*
>> 
> $sudo  ls -ld /var/cache/fonts/*
> Password:
> -rw-rw-rw-    1 root     users         964 2004-04-08 09:35 /var/cache/fonts/ls-R
> drwxr-xr-t    4 root     root           96 2003-06-07 22:11 /var/cache/fonts/pk
> drwxr-xr-t    3 root     root           72 2003-02-10 21:08 /var/cache/fonts/source
> drwxr-xr-t    3 root     root           72 2003-02-10 21:08 /var/cache/fonts/tfm

These should have drwxrwxrwt, all of them, and also all directories
below. I would be interested in knowing how that happened - probably the
best thing to do it, currently, is to fix it and look if it ever shows
up again. In this case it's worth investigating.

Fixing it should be possible as follows:

find /var/cache/fonts/ -type d | xargs chmod a+w
chmod 755 /var/cache/fonts

However, this only explains why you can't do it as a user, root should
always be allowed to create files. Is it possible that this hierarchy is
an NFS mounted volume, on which the local root isn't really root?

Regards, Frank


-- 
Frank Küster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie