Description of Problem: Traditionally anyone who is a member of the uucp group can access the serial ports. Hence /dev/ttyS* is group owned by uucp. To use the serial ports it is necessary to create lock files. These are traditionally created in /var/lock, HOWEVER, /var/lock is now group owned by lock not uucp so non root programs can't create proper locks. HOWEVER there is a /var/lock/uucp which *is* group owned by uucp, BUT the serial using program I tested (mgetty and I think pppd) are making their locks in /var/lock not /var/lock/uucp. There seems to be some confusion over the status of /var/lock and /var/lock/uucp and inconsistent usage. This confusion has broken our application unfortunately because it is run as a user with group membership of uucp and it can't create locks any more. How Reproducible: Steps to Reproduce: 1. ls -la /var/lock 2. note that is is group owned by lock 3. note the presence of a /var/lock/uucp directory group owned by uucp 4. start mgetty/pppd and note them putting their locks in /var/lock
Yup, the "traditional" uucp ownership scheme has changed slightly between 7.[01] and 7.2 in order to become more FHS compliant. Off to mgetty for check to see if mgetty is using baudboy.h locking, bounce to pppd after that. Reassign to me if you can't figger the /usr/include/baudboy.h re-exec of the /usr/sbin/lockdev helper.
Just closing out old bugs here - sorry this one seems to have been neglected for some time. Both mgetty and pppd use their own code to create the /var/lock/LCK..${ttyname} files - luckily, it is now the same file that they both try to lock, and locking works well. So now since 2002 we've established a new "tradition", of using /var/lock/LCK..${ttyname} . It seems uucp itself now uses /var/lock/LCK..${ttyname} files via lockdev(3) for tty locks - so at least mgetty, uucp and pppd do now all use the name lock files, if not the same code to lock them. Perhaps pppd and mgetty should also be updated to use the lockdev(3) functions instead of their own code for locking . But this bug no longer seems to be an issue, so I'm closing as "CURRENTRELEASE" .