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Re: woody man segfaults when run as root



On Thu, Jul 06, 2000 at 12:21:16AM -0400, Brendan Cully wrote:
> On Tuesday, 04 July 2000 at 20:21, Brendan Cully wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I noticed that my up-to-date woody system (plus helixcode) has a man
> > which segfaults when run as root, but works perfectly as an ordinary
> > user. Anyone else seen this?
> > 
> > man-db 2.3.17-1
> > libc6 2.1.3-10
> > libdb2 2.7.7-2
> 
> to follow up on my own post - the problem was in /etc/nsswitch.conf.
> Apparently passwd and group need to be set to "compat". I had "db
> files", presumably hanging about from before I debianised my system.
> 
> anyone know what is going on here, though?

/usr/bin/man is a wrapper that checks if you are root and if so it
does a setuid() to user man then executes /usr/lib/man-db/man

so something in the process of doing setuid() is broken, i would
suspect other things would be broken too.

-- 
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/

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