Re: "/etc/cron.daily/man-db: /var/cache/man: Permission denied"
On Fri, 18 Aug 2006 03:16:08 +0200
Micha <earlymorning@gmx.ch> wrote:
> /etc/cron.daily/man-db:
> find: /var/cache/man: Permission denied
Cron likely runs with no (or low level) permissions.
> /var is mounted as:
> /dev/hda10 on /var type ext2 (rw,nosuid,nodev,errors=remount-ro)
>
Hmm. nosuid on mounts may just not honor the set user id for
executables. On the other hand, the manual page tells me that nosuid
makes it ignore suid bits. (see man mount). So, semantically, those
permissions are just rwxr-x-r-x, and even if yuur user is in the 'root'
group, he cannot view the directory contents (because 'x' in a
directory means permission to enter & view the contents).
First, try mounting /var without the nosuid part.
> The permissions are:
> drwxr-xr-t 17 root root 4.0K 2006-04-02 03:00 /var
> drwxrwxr-x 26 root root 4.0K 2006-08-12 20:49 /var/cache/
> drwxr-sr-x 16 man root 4.0K 2006-08-18 00:06 /var/cache/man
OK, that's the same permissions that are set on my 'etch' box. And,
even though 'dfox' is not a member of the root or man groups, user dfox
(that's me) can run 'find man' in /var/cache/, which lists all
subdirectories underneath man, or find . inside man, which lists a
number of directories where local man pages are kept (that's what the
directory is for, by the way).
Even so, the permisions would seem correct (the third r-x is "other",
and since I am not a "man" :) or a "root", I am an "other", and this is
all good, because I can view files (-r) or go into the directorty (-x)
but an unable to write anything therein.
> drwxr-xr-x 34 root root 4.0K 2006-05-28 13:00 man/
>
> on all levels. - Which seems a little bit weird to me; but
> /var/cache/man seems to have been installed by package
> man-db, too.
All my man directories (under /var/cache/man) are set like:
drwxr-sr-x 2 man root 48 2005-11-12 05:24 cat1
drwxr-sr-x 2 man root 48 2005-11-12 05:24 cat2
drwxr-sr-x 2 man root 48 2005-11-12 05:24 cat3
drwxr-sr-x 2 man root 48 2005-11-12 05:24 cat4
drwxr-sr-x 2 man root 48 2006-05-07 06:30 cat5
I don't see that the system is working, for one - see the dates on
those directories? The way this ought to work (and I thought it did)
was for example, a hypothetical user looks at a frequently used man
page (like man ls). Since it takes more time to process the man page
than display it, a local copy is in /var/cache/man/<appropriate
sect4ion> (in this case, cat1) for later perusal. Man would see that a processed
page was in the appropriate place, and display it. After a time, the
old entries in those cache directories would be deleted.
But, I have 0 bytes in all directories, and an overall usage of 1464K,
because of a large index.db. (That file was changed 2 days ago.)
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
David E. Fox Thanks for letting me
dfox@tsoft.com change magnetic patterns
dfox@m206-157.dsl.tsoft.com on your hard disk.
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