On Wednesday 10 July 2002 10:23, John Joseph Trammell wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 10, 2002 at 09:39:54AM -0500, Peter Clark wrote:
> >         So last night, I was told to change the permissions of /dev/ttyS3
> > to crw-rw----, and it was good. But This morning when I tried to connect,
> > the permissions had changed back to crw-r-----! I did not reboot or
> > anything; the computer was on all night. So I changed it back again.
> > Then, I noticed that my speed had dropped to 3.1k. (I've got a 56k modem,
> > so this is roughly cutting the speed in half.) I looked at the
> > permissions and sure enough, they had changed back to crw-r-----! What's
> > going on? I checked what processes were running, and the only one that
> > seemed remotely possible was lisa, KDE's LAN Information Server (I don't
> > know why that's running, so I stopped it removed it from /etc/init.d.)
> >
> >         :Peter
>
> Possibly you have a cron job that checks (and sets) perms on certain
> files.  Do a 'man -k suid', look in /etc/cron.daily/, look for
> /etc/suid.conf, et cetera.

Nothing suspicious in /etc/cron.daily/:
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          502 Aug 11  2000 calendar
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          277 Mar 15  2000 find
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           51 Sep 12  1999 logrotate
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          838 Jul  3 17:54 man-db
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          226 Dec 17  2001 mgetty
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           86 Oct 21  2000 modutils
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          495 Aug 16  2000 netkit-inetd
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         1118 Feb 17 17:28 ntp-simple
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         2736 Oct  1  2001 standard
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         1197 Jan  3  2002 sysklogd
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          766 Apr 27 00:05 tetex-bin

I also checked cron.weekly and cron.monthly; there didn't seem to be any 
problems there, either, and yet still /dev/ttyS3 got set to crw-r-----. So 
that is at least twice in one day. 
	So then I checked /etc/crontab, but aside from running .daily, .weekly, and 
.monthly, the only other job was to update xplanet, which I've been using for 
six months without a problem.
	There doesn't seem to be a suid.conf anywhere in /etc, and 'find / -name 
suid.conf' didn't turn up anything, either.
	I'm running Debian, so as far as I know there is no rouge program resetting 
my security settings.
	Plus, I still don't know why the modem is stuck at 3.1k. When I first 
dial-up, it's averaging between 5k and 6k, just like a 56k modem should, but 
then after a while it goes down to 3.1k. I've tried two ISPs and I get the 
same behavior, so it's a problem at my end.
	Currently, I'm using wvdial to dialout, since whenever I use KPPP now, it 
connects, then instantly disconnects. /var/log/messages is terribly 
unhelpful--it just says that the modem hung up. Well, duh. KPPP exits with 
error code 16.
	Between this and the lousy KDE font handling (most of the TT and Type1 fonts 
are displayed as little boxes; fonts works just fine in GNOME), I'm getting 
very frustrated...Grr...
	:Peter