Problem with uucp login with SCO XENIX 2.3.1

[Mark J. Bailey]

I have never really noticed anyone complaining, so maybe I read the docs
wrong, but the mkuser command (as is packaged with 2.3.x and HDB UUCP)
creates the home directories for uucp logins in /usr/spool/uucp.  This is
just what the Version 2 UUCP on earlier Xenix versions have been doing.
In and of itself, there is no problem here.  However, I upgraded to 
the 2.3.1 and subsequently setup HDB on my system, and everything worked
like a champ...for one day.  The next day, *ALL* uucp login attempts from
other sites to my system failed after the password.

I discovered that the home directories created by mkuser in /usr/spool/uucp
had vanished mysteriously.  I proceeded to recreate them by hand, and again
everything worked great until the day after.  This problem frustrated me for
several days until I by chance examined the uudemon.clean shell script
supplied with HDB.  I run it every morning around 4:30am.  In stepping through
it, I discovered that the script would delete *ALL* empty directories in
/usr/spool/uucp and also old ones.  Since uucp login home directories are
always empty, they were axed every night.  I corrected this easily enough
by simply relocating my uucp login home directories to /usr/spool/uucphomes
(an arbitrary location, of course).  I also modified the files in 
/usr/lib/mkuser/uucp to have all future uucp logins created in the new
spot.  Once again, all is well with my uucp world. :-)  I will add that
the SCO login does not allow logins of userids that have no existing home
directory.  Some flavors of unix have a default directory.  SCO's login
just shows a message and promptly returns to login.  As the uucp home
directories had been axed, all attempts failed after the password.

It appears to me (whether documented or not) that this is a considerably
devastating problem created by SCO by shipping the release with such a setup.
Again, maybe it is in the docs, if so, I just missed it.  But in either
case, I hope this may be of some help.

Mark.

-- 
Mark J. Bailey                                    "Y'all com bak naw, ya hear!"
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