Problem with uucp login with SCO XENIX 2.3.1

[Bill Kennedy]

In article <397 at mjbtn.MFEE.TN.US> root at mjbtn.MFEE.TN.US (Mark J. Bailey) writes:
>
>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.

I do not have SCO's HDB, so I am ignorant about mkuser.  I am, however
rather familiar with several variants of HDB and what's killing Mark and
the fixes he arrived at are not correct.  The home directory in /etc/passwd
should be /usr/spool/uucppublic for all uucp logins.  The uucico and uux
will create directories and files as needed in /usr/spool/uucp/sitename just
as uudemon.cleanup will get rid of them if they are empty.

There's a similar minefield (if mkuser really makes spool/uucp be the home
directory) in the AT&T (ISC?) adm shell.  If you remove a uucp user and
agree to the removal of its home directory then your logins fail because
it can't chdir to /usr/spool/uucppublic.

[ ... ]

>always empty, they were axed every night.  I corrected this easily enough
>by simply relocating my uucp login home directories to /usr/spool/uucphomes

You don't really need to do that and if it was my system, I would not.
There's nothing wrong with having public as the home directory since you
can grant and deny access with the Permissions file and uux/uucico run
setuid uucp in order to write in /usr/spool/uucp/sitename, creating it if
it isn't there.

[ ... ]

>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.

If mkuser is, indeed, the culprit then they have shipped you a pain in the
neck, but if you change the home directory to public it sounds like they are
shipping pretty much plain vanilla HDB.

>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.

If it's documented then I haven't seen it either, but it's the way that
the distributed passwd came (for nuucp) and it works OK.  Just remember
that when you delete a uucp login you should not agree to remove its home
directory or you'll kill 'em all.

>Mark.

I started to email that but decided to post instead since SCO HDB is rather
new.  I hope it helps Mark and anyone else who didn't know and I hope that
there aren't fifteen jillion followups saying the same thing I did, there
aren't any here...
-- 
Bill Kennedy  usenet      {killer,att,cs.utexas.edu,sun!daver}!ssbn!bill
              internet    bill at ssbn.WLK.COM