Date: Tue, 9 Apr 2002 22:15:36 -0700 From: "Crist J. Clark" <crist.clark@attbi.com> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> Cc: Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org>, Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com>, Michael Smith <msmith@FreeBSD.ORG>, Doug White <dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu>, =?iso-8859-1?Q?Pawe=B3_Jakub_Dawidek?= <nick@garage.freebsd.pl>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Hardlinks... Message-ID: <20020409221536.A34659@blossom.cjclark.org> In-Reply-To: <3CB37C7C.6F6EE24A@mindspring.com>; from tlambert2@mindspring.com on Tue, Apr 09, 2002 at 04:42:52PM -0700 References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0204091210120.57350-100000@InterJet.elischer.org> <3CB37C7C.6F6EE24A@mindspring.com>
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On Tue, Apr 09, 2002 at 04:42:52PM -0700, Terry Lambert wrote:
> Julian Elischer wrote:
> > As terry knows of course, the Interjet
> > had the following /etc/symlinks: (excuse linewrap)
> > lrwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 20 Mr 28 2001 crontab@ ->
> > /writable/system/crontab
> > lrwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 18 Mr 28 2001 group@ ->
> > /writable/system/group
>
> [ ... ]
>
> > the single root+usr partition is mounted read-only.
>
> Yes, but appealing to a product I had something to do with,
> even if that organization wasn't mine in particular, makes
> a much less powerful argument.
>
> The other thing that's a bit painful about that argument
> is that the symlinks failed to operate as expected for
> the master.passwd, if the / was mounted read/write. I
> count this as a bug in the password database generation
> code, but it should be noted that it can be a problem (e.g
> the symlink is renamed to the backup, and the replacement
> file is created in /etc; it does the right thing, if the
> symlink is read-only, though...).
Exactly, you can't use symlinks with the passwd(1) and pwd_mkdb(8)
commands as they stand. The commands will bail when they try to create
a temporary file in /etc, /etc/pw.XXXXXX if /etc is read-only. If
/etc is not read-only, the symlinks will get removed and the files
actually written in /etc.
--
Crist J. Clark | cjclark@alum.mit.edu
| cjclark@jhu.edu
http://people.freebsd.org/~cjc/ | cjc@freebsd.org
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