[plug] Debian newbie question re:permissions

[Greg Mildenhall]

On Tue, 16 Oct 2001, sol wrote:
> I chmod'ed both /usr/sbin/pppd and /etc/ppp/options to 777 (isn't it a 
> no-no to leave configuration files with open permissions, especially if 
> they contain passwords?) and we must be making progress because I got a 
> different error message:
> /usr/sbin/pppd: must be root to run /usr/sbin/pppd, since it is not 
> setuid-root

So you want it to be set-uid root.

It is set-uid to root so that regardless of who runs it, it will have root
priveleges. Because this is a security risk, only those who are either
root or group "dip" can run it, and noone is in group dip by default.
If, at the beginning, you had just added yourself to group dip, everything
would probably have worked fine. As it is, you've changed a lot of ther
things in the process of fixing it, and I would recommend that you try to
restore those things. In other words, it would make sense to change the
permissions of those files to the permissions of a standard Debian
install, and someone has been kind enough to post those for you. Hopefully
if you revert those permissions, keep the new entry in /etc/group, and use
a terminal that logged in _after_ the groups file changed, everything will
run smoothly. If not, the list should be able to help you fairly easily,
since your system will be in a known state.

In case you're not sure how to set the suid bit on the pppd executable,
you want to use chmod with a "4" prepended to the mode:

chmod 4750 /usr/sbin/pppd

HTH,

-Greg