*BSD News Article 97096


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From: vibes@hipdrome.org (Jørn-Morten Innselset)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Weird change of ownership
Date: 4 Jun 1997 19:58:29 GMT
Organization: SN Internett
Lines: 24
Message-ID: <slrn5pbiae.l0.vibes@pc193.janco.sn.no>
NNTP-Posting-Host: pc193.janco.sn.no
X-Newsreader: slrn (0.9.3.2 UNIX)
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:42374

Today something happened on my 2.2.2 system that had me completely baffled.
All of a sudden my SO complained about getting "Access denied" messages 
when trying to connect to my FreeBSD computer (she's running a Win95 based
Xserver on her own computer). I investigated the matter, and found that
all the files in her ~ directory (including the .rhosts file) mysteriously 
had *me* as the owner (the owner group was still her own, though). Oh well 
- I figured that I had been messing around to much with my root access, and
chowned the files back. Then I fired up slrn on my own account - and got 
complaints about not finding the .newsrc file. What had happened? You
guessed it - all *my* files had *her* as the owner. Now this made a bit less
sense, but I chowned again - not prepared to dwell on it more. Half an hour 
later the same thing happened again, though. All ownerships were switched
again. Now I chowned the directories itself with the -R option, and it has
been OK for the last two hours. 

What am I missing here? Will the ownership of the files default back to the
owner of the directory after a while? Sounds pretty unlikely to me - not 
being a UNIX expert at all. Could anyone offer a reasonable explanation as
to why this happened in the first place - or would I be better off 
forgetting all about it? ;)

-- 
http://www.bs.bi.no/people/jinnsels/
vibes@hipdrome.org