On Sat, 3 Feb 2001 at 11:49pm (-0600), David Talkington wrote:
>
> Discovered something strange (to me) today.
>
> I tried to play an audio file on my RH7 box, and discovered that I
> couldn't ... permission denied. Hmm ... worked last time. Checked
> perms on /dev/audio* and /dev/dsp*, and found that they were owned by
> another user.
[...]
> Assuming this dynamic-ownership phenomenon is normal, I wonder what
> caused it to stop working on the problem box?
This sounds like normal behaviour. These permission changes are driven by
pam_console. When you login at a console device, like a tty (as apposed to
a pty) or a local X display (:0) pam_console has a look in
/var/lock/console.lock to see if anyone else already 'owns' the console and
if not gives ownership to you. /var/lock/console/<user> contains a count of
the number of console logins the console owner has so that even if they
logout on the original console device, if they're still login in on another
then they retain ownership. Once your login count reaches zero the device
permissions revert to their original values.
The general idea is that if you're pysically sitting at the computer
you may use the sound card and floppy drive ect, but if you're logged in
over the network you may not. Theory being that only one user will be
physically at the console at once.
The upshot of all this is that not all logins are created equal and all may
not be as it seems. If you're concerened it is genuinly broken have a look
at the files in /var/lock and see if they match up with what you're seeing.
I've found that using some display managers (xdm or wdm) permissions did not
properly revert when the user logged out becuase the display manager had
dropped all its privlidges so couldn't remove the lockfiles or do any
chown'ing. I went back to using gdm for that reason - shame really. :)
Hope that helps or at least gets out pointed in generally the right
direction...
M.
--
WebCentral Pty Ltd Australia's #1 Internet Web Hosting Company
Level 1, 96 Lytton Road. Network Operations - Systems Engineer
PO Box 4169, East Brisbane. phone: +61 7 3249 2583
Queensland, Australia. pgp key id: 0x900E515F
_______________________________________________
Redhat-list mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
