PAM `/var/' permissions are lax ??

[Erik P. Olsen]

Nalin Dahyabhai wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 03, 2008 at 05:14:27PM +0100, Erik P. Olsen wrote:
>> I am getting subject error message quite often in logwatch and in 
>> secure.log there are thousands of them. Does it mean that the permission of 
>> directory /var is too lousy? I checked the permission bits and they are 
>> 777, so I changed them to 755 but I am still receiving the message.
>>
>> Should I worry? And if so what can I do?
> 
> When you run "ls -ld /var", which user and group names are given as the
> owners?  Both should be "root", which is what's specified by the
> "filesystem" package, which includes this directory.

drwxr-xr-x  24 root root   4096 2008-02-05 17:13 var

> 
> This sort of thing sometimes happens to a directory if another package
> also claims to include it, but does so with different permissions.  Run
> "rpm -qf /var" to get a list of which packages claim to do so, and if
> you see any package other than "filesystem" there, then you've found a
> bug in that other package -- please report it.

filesystem-2.4.6-1.fc7
> 
> Regardless, you can use RPM to fix the reset permissions and ownerships
> to the values specified for the "filesystem" package by running
> "rpm --setperms --setugids filesystem" as root.

Gave following messages:
chown: cannot access `/mnt/cdrom': No such file or directory
chgrp: cannot access `/mnt/cdrom': No such file or directory
chown: cannot access `/mnt/floppy': No such file or directory
chgrp: cannot access `/mnt/floppy': No such file or directory

I don't believe this has anything to do with the PAM message, so I guess all 
should now be OK. I'll see what logwatch says tonight.

-- 
Erik.