URGENT: REDHAT 6.1 STORES SAMBA PRIVATE FILES IN /etc

[David Bannon]

At 07:52 PM 21/12/1999 +1100, Volker Lendecke wrote:
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>
>> 1) you CANNOT put smbpasswd in /etc.
>
>People who play with permissions in /etc/ have to know what they
>do. The standard installation does it just fine, and if you chmod
>anything there, you are on your own.
>

My initial comment was from a convience point of view, not security. Samba
(and similar packages such as Apache) arrive in a nice discrete lump. You
can see all the files under /usr/local/samba belong to samba, you can be
sure there are no more (apart from startup scripts) hidden away somewhere
you did not expect and there are only a few files in each directry. But
most importantly, the docs all talk about files being in this particular
tree structure !

Along comes redhat (and others) grabs things like samba and does it their
way. Someone doing an upgrade a few months later needs to completely remove
the redhat rpm and then install samba from the cvs, then go off and set up
the startup files. I've never let redhat do a samba install, but I have
wasted some time restoring an Apache one. 

Even if they stick with the rpm (control freaks shudder), it must cause
problems. When people on this list for example, talk about file locations
they almost always assume the /usr/local/samba structure, it must be most
confusing for someone following the rpm course.

David

------------------------------------------------------------
David Bannon                      D.Bannon at latrobe.edu.au
School of Biochemistry            Phone 61 03 9479 2197
La Trobe University, Plenty Rd,   Fax   61 03 9479 2467
Bundoora, Vic, Australia, 3083    http://bioserve.latrobe.edu.au
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..... Humpty Dumpty was pushed !