Re: Why is oninit (and others) setuid root?

At 12:16 AM 6/30/95, Scott Dunbar wrote: > >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 Scott - I do not recall exactly what occurs, but oninit is setuid for root, because in the early phases on startup, oninit makes several system calls, which require root UID. Once these are complete, the oninit process actually sets uid back to informix. This rather combersome, because on some platforms, mine in particular, I can't generate a core because real and effective UID's are never the same. >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) /INFORMIXTMP is covered in one of the manuals. The contents I believe are only pointers for keeping track of shared memory and network connection instances, etc. You should RTFM, because it is either in the DBA book, or the 7.1 enhancement doc. These files are required for proper operation, and should not be deleted. And 'no', the INFORMIXTMP cannot be moved. You may be able to move and create a symbolic link, but I've never tried this. Anyway, again, very little goes here. Never seen a /TT_DB directory. Are sure it wasn't created by someone on your sight?? >Are there any security concerns here? I do not believe so. It's been this way for a long time, and I have not had any problems. >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. Hope this helps. Jon ================================================================== Jon Vemo Internet: jvemo@cyberspace.com Bothell, WA USA ------------------------------------------------------------------ Watch out for road-kill on the information superhighway....SPLAT!! ==================================================================