/ owned by bin causes sshd to complain bad ownership

Julian H. Stacey jhs at berklix.com
Fri Jun 22 13:44:10 UTC 2012


Hi freebsd-security at freebsd.org
On an 8.3-RELEASE running sshd, /var/log/auth.log 
	Jun 22 12:54:06 lapr sshd[57505]: Authentication refused:
		bad ownership or modes for directory /
Until I did
	chown 0:0 /
( It was previously
	drwxr-xr-x  25 bin   bin       1024 Jun 20 19:53 ./
)
The chown is consistent with all of 8.3 /bin also being root & not bin,

BUT

Over use of Root seems Bad. 
Our ownership scheme has degraded compared to early 1980s Unix, where
	most bin & lib files & dirs were owned by bin, except for
		- a few SUID bins that Needed root
		- occasional administrator droppings,
		  temporary accidental files that glared at the eyeball,
		  as root, cos near all else was just bin.

IMO very little in a system should be user root.

Apologies, but to guide replies :
	(after threads burnt by a troll on another list)
	I'd not appreciate replies just along the lines of
		 "It has to be to satisfy existing software". 
	I'd much rather receive replies along lines of 
		"What would be best ownership scheme, advantages &
		 disadvantages + should we change anything ?"

Cheers,
Julian
-- 
Julian Stacey, BSD Unix Linux C Sys Eng Consultants Munich http://berklix.com
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