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From: "Fish" <fish AT infidels DOT org>
To: "Cygwin List" <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
Subject: RE: RESEND man.conf permissions problem
Date: Thu, 5 Aug 2004 00:35:00 -0700
Keywords: fish
Message-ID: <003201c47abe$b6ea4d80$0100a8c0@asswipe>
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Larry Hall wrote:

<snip>
>  From the information you provided so far, it looks to me
> like you installed initially some things as "Administator"
> and subsequently some others as "fish".

Correct. Is that not allowed?? Would that cause problems? (and if so,
how/why would it? [cause problems])

> So you have a mix-and-match of file permissions.

What does you mean by that?

> I'd recommend one of two things:
> 
>   1. Completely uninstall and remove the directory that you
>      installed Cygwin to.  Recreate the directory as the user
>      you will install as and then run 'setup.exe' as that user.

Pass. :)

>   2. Try changing the owner and/or permissions in your Cygwin
>      tree to something amenable to the user you want to run as
>      (via chown/chmod).

Well, I took ownership of *everything* on all drives and all folders
on my entire system just to see if that made any difference and it
doesn't. :(

What chown and/or chmod command should I (or do I need to) use? What
options?

And how would that fix things?

And/or for that matter, how would using chown/chmod be better than
using, say, Windows's existing ability to modify file system security
settings?? Doesn't Cygwin simply utilize Windows's existing security
features? Or does Cygwin implement its own security?

Sorry for all these questions, but I really want to understand this!
(so that it'll be less likely that I should have to bother you guys
with questions/problems in the future) Thanks. :)

> Also, it looks like your '/etc/passwd' and '/etc/group' need some
> updating. Take a look at 'man mkpasswd' and 'man mkgroup' for some
> information on the options here.

I read the man pages for both mkpasswd and mkgroup and then tried
deleting those files and recreating them via:

  mkgroup -l > /etc/group
  mkpasswd -l > /etc/passwd

but it didn't seem to make any difference. :(


Some additional information (in case any of this makes any difference
to Cygwin):

1. The "Everyone" group is, purposely, not normally included in ANY
of my file/folder permissions on my system (in fact, it doesn't even
officially exist as a valid user group on Windows 2000). Same with
the "Users", "Power Users", etc, groups. The ONLY user groups I allow
*any* access to my system to are the "Administrators" group and my
[manually created] "Friends" group (and the only members of my
'Friends' user group is myself (fish), Administrator, SYSTEM, asswipe
(my computer's name <grin>), a few test accounts I created (for some
virtual test machines of mine) and my wife and daughter (although
neither normally uses my system (since they have systems of their
own) and only my wife has Admin privileges).

However, there ARE files/folders all throughout my system (including
within the Cygwin directory tree) with the [non-existent!] "Everyone"
group amongst the security/permissions settings. <shrug>

2. I (fish) -- and ONLY me (AFAIK) --  have assigned "ownership" of
ALL files and folders on my system.

3. I happened to notice (after using a handy dandy SysInternals[1]
utility called "AccessEnum" to check out my permissions since I'm
having problems with them) something that strikes me as rather odd:
in the "/lib/gcc-lib/i686-pc-cygwin/3.3/include" directory there are
a few files (see below) with userid "None"(?!) in the write
permissions(!!). Why is that?? I don't have a userid "None" defined
anywhere on my system! :)  (at least not that I'm aware of anyway! :)

- ------------------------------------------------------
AccessEnum export (sorry for the crappy formatting):

"Path"	"Read"	"Write"	"Deny"	
"D:\Cygwin\lib\gcc-lib\i686-pc-cygwin\3.3\include\float.h"	"Everyone"
"ASSWIPE\fish ASSWIPE\None"	""	
"D:\Cygwin\lib\gcc-lib\i686-pc-cygwin\3.3\include\iso646.h"
"Everyone"	"ASSWIPE\fish ASSWIPE\None"	""	
"D:\Cygwin\lib\gcc-lib\i686-pc-cygwin\3.3\include\mmintrin.h"
"Everyone"	"ASSWIPE\fish ASSWIPE\None"	""	
"D:\Cygwin\lib\gcc-lib\i686-pc-cygwin\3.3\include\README"	"Everyone"
"ASSWIPE\fish ASSWIPE\None"	""	
"D:\Cygwin\lib\gcc-lib\i686-pc-cygwin\3.3\include\stdarg.h"
"Everyone"	"ASSWIPE\fish ASSWIPE\None"	""	
"D:\Cygwin\lib\gcc-lib\i686-pc-cygwin\3.3\include\stdbool.h"
"Everyone"	"ASSWIPE\fish ASSWIPE\None"	""	
"D:\Cygwin\lib\gcc-lib\i686-pc-cygwin\3.3\include\stddef.h"
"Everyone"	"ASSWIPE\fish ASSWIPE\None"	""	
"D:\Cygwin\lib\gcc-lib\i686-pc-cygwin\3.3\include\syslimits.h"
"Everyone"	"ASSWIPE\fish ASSWIPE\None"	""	
"D:\Cygwin\lib\gcc-lib\i686-pc-cygwin\3.3\include\unwind.h"
"Everyone"	"ASSWIPE\fish ASSWIPE\None"	""	
"D:\Cygwin\lib\gcc-lib\i686-pc-cygwin\3.3\include\varargs.h"
"Everyone"	"ASSWIPE\fish ASSWIPE\None"	""	
"D:\Cygwin\lib\gcc-lib\i686-pc-cygwin\3.3\include\xmmintrin.h"
"Everyone"	"ASSWIPE\fish ASSWIPE\None"	""	
- ------------------------------------------------------


I thought I understood Windows permissions but apparently there's
still something I'm missing (not understanding) regarding Windows
permissions (and how Cygwin handles/deals with them).

ANYTHING you (or anyone else) can do to help me understand what the
frick is going on (and how to fix it) would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.


(But I DON'T want to have to delete (uninstall) all of Cygwin and
then reinstall it all over again to do it! (if I can help it). I
*will* if I absolutely have to, but I'm much rather NOT do that if I
don't have to, so if there's something else more palatable that I
could maybe do to fix this problem (and I'd appreciated explicit
instructions too (i.e. exact command format, etc) just to be on the
safe side (I'm not a "dummy" but I prefer to play it safe and play
one whenever I'm having problems that I don't understand)) I'd very
much appreciate that. Thanks.)

(Sorry for the long post)

- -- 
"Fish" (David B. Trout)
   fish AT infidels DOT org

Fight Spam! Join CAUCE!
http://www.cauce.org/

[1] http://www.sysinternals.com

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