[Zope-dev] zope and UNIX permissions

Bill Anderson bill@libc.org
Tue, 11 Jul 2000 11:07:40 -0600


Chris McDonough wrote:
> 
> Using gnutar, untarring as the root user preserves ownership on
> expansion by default.  Not sure if FreeBSD uses gnutar (I imagine not),
> but this is the case with gnutar under Linux.  I think this is what
> happened to him... he said he could not use the RPM release and was
> working with the source distribution, so I don't think the problem is
> with the RPM.


He seemed to be mostly griping about files that were wide open (777). On
2.2.0b4 the only ones I get are:
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root 13 Jul 11 01:36 lib/python/ZEO/cPickle.so
-> ../cPickle.so
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root 13 Jul 11 01:36 lib/python/ZServer ->
../../ZServer
srwxrwxrwx    1 root     root 0 Jul 11 02:08 var/pcgi.soc


Notes:
o All but one of these are symbolic links. 
  No way around 777 on them. 
  No cause for alarm on them either. 
o The two symlinks are from ZEO, and thus would 
  not be in a default tarball.

Now, I do *nix security for a living, and I don't have any issues with
these few, unexposed 777's. I'd be interested to hear what the concerns,
and how to avoid them are.

Zope is actually one of the two places I avoid the RPMs (The other being
Kernel RPMs), adn always stick to source, so I can't vouch for the
permissions of files in the RPM

As I read his post, btw, it looked like he avoided the RPMs dues to the
problems, and was looking for source.


I have a copy of the 2.1.6 source; I'll look at that tonight for
permissions.

Bill

-- 
"Linux: the operating system with a CLUE...
Command Line User Environment".

seen in a posting on comp.software.testing