[ILUG] Re: /dev/ttyS3: Permission denied

[John P . Looney]

On Sat, Sep 18, 1999 at 06:37:53PM -0700, Michael Treacy mentioned:
> I walkd away from my laptop tonight for about 5 mins while it was connected 
> to the net. When I came back, the line had dropped and when I tried to 
> restart the connection, it told me that permission had been denied for 
> /dev/ttyS3.
> 
> I'm using SuSE 6.2 and Wvdial as the dialer. I have no problem running 
> wvdial as root and before the problem arose, I could run it as an ordinary 
> user also. On typing in "ls -l /dev/ttyS3" the following came back:
> 
> crw-r-----   1 root  uucp    4,  67 Sep 19 00:38   /dev/ttyS3
> 
> 
> Any ideas how to remedy the problem? Is one of the flags incorrect? I 
> noticed that if I did ls -l /dev/ttyS4, I got:
> 
> crw-rw----    1 root   uucp   4,  68 Sep 19 00:38   /dev/ttyS4
> 
> 
> Is it the missing w in the permissions that is causing the problems?

 More than likely. That serial port was set up to be only writeable by
root, while ttyS4 was writeable by anyone in the uucp group - which you
become, when you run your dialup stuff, courtesy of a setgid program.

Kate

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