Subject: Re: NetBSD 2 installation on a Jornada 720
To: Brad Spencer <brad@anduin.eldar.org>
From: Richard Danter <richard.danter@ntlworld.com>
List: port-hpcarm
Date: 01/12/2005 18:24:57
Brad Spencer wrote:
>    > 
>    >    1. When logged in as a normal user, I would expect to be able to 'su -' 
>    >    to become root. The user is in the 'wheel' group, but all I get is 
>    >    "Sorry" and I am back at my user prompt. Any ideas why? This seems to 
>    >    work fine on my laptop.
>    > 
>    > I would double check the group permissions.  What you are trying to do
>    > should function correctly, assuming that the group is set up right.
> 
>    The groups look right, but I am wondering about some file permissions. 
>    Since I just extracted the tgz files to the flash disk as root, not all 
>    the files have the right permissions. For example, though I can do 
>    anything as root, I can't (or rather I couldn't) run 'vi' as a regular 
>    user. Turns out I needed to set the file permissions for /tmp and 
>    /var/tmp/vi.recover to 01777. I bet there are other files and 
>    directories incorrectly set up... Is the a script to check that?
> 
> Ohh...  many troubles will happen if the permissions / ownership and
> groupship isn't right.  Since you used 'tar' to extract things, make sure
> you used the 'p' option to preserve the permissions.  I do not believe
> that there is any sort of post install step that sets up the permisssions
> on the machine.  If you didn't use 'p', then the safest thing to do,
> probably, would be to reextract everything with it.  Although, I suppose
> one could write a correction program based on the permissions of a known
> working NetBSD system of the same generation.  The install program
> probably uses 'p' when it extracts the tar files, which is probably why
> things are correct there.

That was it! I somehow forgot to use the -p option with tar. Doh!! Now 
everything is working as expected.

Thanks loads!
Rich