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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!ihnp4.ucsd.edu!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!bt!usenet From: alex@mlbg79.btlabsmh.bt.co.uk (Alex Barclay) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: Re: xload and access to load average Date: 2 Nov 1994 10:36:28 GMT Organization: BT Lines: 30 Message-ID: <397q3c$27l@pheidippides.axion.bt.co.uk> References: <3976mm$i8i@lynx.unm.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: abpc.mavericks.bt.co.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Newsreader: WinVN 0.92.6 In article <3976mm$i8i@lynx.unm.edu>, ahvezda@jemez.eece.unm.edu (Ales Vaclav Hvezda) says: > when I try to run it as a >regular user I get: > > xload: couldn't obtain load average > >(There are some binary chars printed after that) > >The file, xload, has the following permissions: > > -rwsr-xr-x 1 bin kmem 12288 Sep 28 08:07 /usr/X11R6/bin/xload > It seems to me that xload is running SUID so therefore /dev/kmem would need to be accessable to "bin". If you make xload SGID then kmem and /dev/kmem would have a common group and the access will work. You need the perms: -rwxr-sr-x 1 bin kmem etc..... xload and for /dev/kmem: crw-r----- 1 root kmem etc.... kmem This is a secure way of doing things as the SGID will only ever give xload "read" access to kmem which is all that it needs. "write" access may be a bad idea if you have buggy code accessing it. Hope this helps, Alex.