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Bug 78553

Summary:	FAM broken by design?
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	Jack Neely <jjneely>
Component:	fam	Assignee:	Alexander Larsson <alexl>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	8.0	CC:	mitr
Target Milestone:	---	Keywords:	FutureFeature
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Enhancement
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2002-11-25 18:38:50 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Jack Neely 2002-11-25 18:38:43 UTC

Description of Problem:
I think that this is a known problem but I don't see it documented any where so
I will here or at an upstream point if someone will point me in the right direction.

FAM assumes that it can read your home directory (or whatever directory) as a
daemon run by root.  This doesn't work on all filesystems and causes some
interesting problems.  With AFS the user must be authenticated and have the
proper access rights to be able to read in a directory and in all cases this
does not include root.  The root user translates to system:anyuser which is
normally given no access rights to home directories.  I assume that similar
issues would happen with other file systems.

Shouldn't this be a daemon started as the user who's files are to be monitored?

On Red Hat Linux 7.3 this causes desktop icons to simply dissapear when clicked
on among other oddities.  Disabling FAM seems to work around the issue pretty
well but applications (gedit) complain pretty bitterly and I have the feeling
that applications will become more dependant on this in the future.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
fam-2.6.8-4
fam-2.6.7-6
I guess I should just say all versions.

How Reproducible:
Always.

Comment 1 Alexander Larsson 2002-11-26 08:50:27 UTC

Yes. This is another reason why FAM is the suck(tm).

It's not really fixable with the current implementation though. I have long
wanted to do a rewrite of fam that is per-user and sane. I still hope that I may
some day have time to do it.

I'm marking this WONTFIX though, because in the context of fam it's unfixable.