Why is oninit (and others) setuid root?

Posted in 1995

Scott Dunbar — Fri, 30 Jun 1995 00:16:24 — source: Informix-list mailing list archive (1991-1998)

I am fairly new to the Informix world after using another mainstream UNIX RDMS for several years. I am in the process of moving my company from 5.x to 7.x of the Informix dataserver. My question is why are several of the programs in the bin directory suid root? The oninit program creates a /INFORMIXTMP and /TT_DB. Can these be moved somewhere else? Of the 4,576,937,374 manuals I have (ok, it just feels that way) these are not mentioned (or I missed it) Are there any security concerns here? My root partition doesn't have all that much space in the first place and having Informix put stuff here may not help. This is under Solaris 2.4 and 2.5 with Online 7.10.UC1. Any info would be appreciated. scott dunbar chicago, il, usa dunbar@interaccess.com