From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Sep 3 12:42:18 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3A16616A4C0 for ; Wed, 3 Sep 2003 12:42:18 -0700 (PDT) Received: from jordan.llnl.gov (jordan.llnl.gov [128.115.36.14]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2F23543FE9 for ; Wed, 3 Sep 2003 12:42:15 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from alley1@llnl.gov) Received: from jordan.llnl.gov (wea@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by jordan.llnl.gov (8.12.6/8.12.6) with ESMTP id h83Jg8Kt000897; Wed, 3 Sep 2003 12:42:08 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (wea@localhost)h83Jg8XA000894; Wed, 3 Sep 2003 12:42:08 -0700 (PDT) Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2003 12:42:07 -0700 (PDT) From: Ed Alley To: Message-ID: <20030903121233.D868-100000@jordan.llnl.gov> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII cc: sk@isprime.com cc: edalley@covad.net Subject: Re: File permissions suddenly change for /dev/null. X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 03 Sep 2003 19:42:18 -0000 On Tue, 2 Sep 2003, Ed Alley wrote: > >> I'm running FreeBSD-4.8. Sometimes the file permissions for /dev/null >> gets mysteriously changed by some unknown process to: >> >> crw------- 1 root wheel 2, 2 Sep 2 11:20 /dev/null On Tue, 2 Sep 2003, David Landgren wrote: >> ..., the moral of the story is, what have you installed recently? On Tue, 2 Sep 2003, Matthew Seaman wrote: >> ... It would have to be a root-owned process ... On Tue, 2 Sep 2003, Scott Kupferschmidt wrote: >> I had the same problem and still unable to figure it out.. I thankyou all for the above comments. They were helpful to me in finding the problem: When I thought about it for a time I realized that it happens on days that I was doing administrative work as ROOT! It was NETSCAPE! running under root. It turns out that I periodically tweak our router via Netscape. If I happen to be logged in as root on my FreeBSD terminal when I log into the router with Netscape, then after I'm finished with my work and close Netscape, I find that the permissions on /dev/null have been reset to: crw-------. I'm running Netscape-4.76. I also have a late version of Mozilla installed which doesn't seem to mangle the file permissions on /dev/null the way Netscape does. I also don't need to be logged in as root when I run Netscape to tweak the router, it just happens that when I'm doing other administrative stuff I think to look at the router also. (:->) Ed Alley wea@llnl.gov