Re: can't run as root with netbsd-5

[Eric Haszlakiewicz <erh%nimenees.com@localhost>]

On Wed, Mar 04, 2009 at 05:31:39PM +1100, bsd-xen%roguewrt.org@localhost wrote:
> A major upgrade without physical access ... you're game!
> 
> And not syncing your userland and kernel while you have physical
> root access, life on the edge! hehe

 I thought I had shorn up that edge pretty well by doing a test upgrade
on a copy of the machine, but I guess I missed something.

> How are you doing the upgrade? Via build.sh and the 5.0 release tag or
> binary sets?

        via the 5.0 RC2 build off ftp.netbsd.org.  I actually have all the
sets extracted into a directory, but since I need to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH
to run things out of there I can't run setuid programs like su.  (it
needs libpam, which isn't in /lib)

> If you are unable to 'su -' and stopping existing processes etc doesn't
> help, I can only suggest extracting the sets from some kind of boot media.
  
> I wonder if it's ksh specific and whether sh has the same problem.
        Yeah, it's the same problem, even with sh (or any other binary):
sudo -u root /bin/sh
Password:
sudo: unable to execute /bin/sh: Resource temporarily unavailable

> It's this kind of scenario that makes xen a blessing.
        heh, my plan is to run xen on the machine.  Upgrading to netbsd 5
is supposed to be the first step in that.

eric