port problems

[Sam Couter]

Blake Swadling <blake at poblbonk.com> wrote:
> i have a deb 2.2 machin here that wont let me irc as a normal user (it will as root hough). the error i get from BitchX is ...
> 
> Connecting to port 6667 of server au.asutnet.org [refnum 0]
> Unable to connect to port 6667 of server au.asutnet.org: cannot assign requested address

This error can be returned from bind(). If it works as root but not as a
normal user, that hints towards trying to bind a low-numbered port (with
bindresvport() or similar). I have no idea why BitchX would be trying to
do that though.

How about using strace to see what system call returned the error, and
what its arguments were?

> to me this sounds like a permissions problem, but i have no idead where to start. i tried playing with permission on /dev/port but this was of no help. I have disabled my firewall aswell and this also has no effect.

/dev/port is "I/O port access", according to devices.txt in the kernel
source documentation. I think it means programmed IO ports, like some
microprocessors (notably Intel i386) have.

I've never found a way to change permissions on network devices, and I
don't think it's possible on Linux. They seem to be the only device that
escapes the "Everything is a file" attitude of unix, and exist in an
entirely seperate namespace to every other device. I'm sure there's a
reason for that.
-- 
Sam Couter          |   Internet Engineer   |   http://www.topic.com.au/
sam at topic.com.au    |   tSA Consulting      |
OpenPGP key ID:       DE89C75C,  available on key servers
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