Matthew Miller wrote:
On Tue, Nov 23, 2004 at 08:54:45PM -0500, Randy Chrismon wrote:Mea culpa! Mea maxima culpa!
<snip>
From the 'rpm' man page -- the "M" means the 'mode' (a.k.a. filepermissions) have changed. And, as the first error message above indicates, this binary needs to be setuid root -- that is, owned by root and have the setuid file permission.
Have you run any scripts to "secure" your system? An overzealous [1] security sweep could very easily choose to remove that bit....
(The "G" is also a little bit disturbing -- it means the group ownership has changed, and on my system, it's in group "root". Odd for that to change.)
Two lessons: 1. I don't know what I'm doing, generally, and particularly with file permissions and user rights. 2. Don't do things when you don't know what you're doing.
A few days before I noticed the problem, I did a chown on one of the /usr subdirectories (I don't even remember which one, now) so I could execute an executable of some sort. That's probably where things got messed up. Don't ask me what I was thinking because I probably wasn't.
Anyway, I've changed the user:group back to root:root. Now, I don't even get the insufficient privileges message box. Whatever system setting app now just refuses to start. OTOH, now I know what I did wrong, where I did it, and what man pages to look at. Thanks for all the help; I wouldn't have made it this far, otherwise.
Randy
