From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021212 Description of problem: I changed my umask to 0026 some time ago. Yesterday I used network configuration (providing the root password when asked) to change the phone number for a ppp device and altered nothing else. I have verified the following through controlled experiments. After hitting Apply to commit the changes I got lots of errors which I tracked down to the following files having access bits of rw-/r--/---, /etc/hosts, /etc/resolv.conf and (possibly) /etc/aliases.db. It appears there are two bugs: my personal umask rather than root's is being used unnecessary files are being updated The end result of these two bugs is that I can render networking unusable for non-root users (before you ask root's umask is the default 0022). Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Have a user set their umask to 0026 2. use the network config t change the phone no of a ppp connection 3. hit apply 4. ls -ltr /etc Actual Results: /etc/hosts, /etc/resolv.conf and (possibly) /etc/aliases.db have access bits of rw-/r--/--- Expected Results: these files should not have been altered, but if they were the access bits should have been rw-/r--/r-- Additional info: