PAM `/var/' permissions are lax ??

[Nalin Dahyabhai]

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.

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.

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.

HTH,

Nalin