Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!sun-barr!apple!coherent!dplatt
From: dplatt@coherent.com (Dave Platt)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: sort problem while running expire -r
Keywords: sort Sun temp /tmp
Message-ID: <34944@coherent.coherent.com>
Date: 28 Sep 89 22:09:56 GMT
References: <34850@coherent.coherent.com>
Reply-To: dplatt@coherent.com (Dave Platt)
Distribution: news
Organization: Coherent Thought Inc., Palo Alto CA
Lines: 44

Well, I found the problem.  Pilot error on our end.

I had tried running sort manually, and from within expire, with the
options "-T/usr/tmp" and "-T /usr/tmp".  Neither seemed to work.

I received some messages from people who suggested that this option
_should_ work... and, in fact, that I might not even need it, since at
least one version of sort (SunOS 4.0.x) tries to place its files in
/usr/tmp, and switches over to /tmp only if it can't put them into
/usr/tmp.

I then tried running the sort again, trying the option again... and this
time it worked!  Why?  Well, the first times I had tried it, I was
running suid=news;  the time it worked, I was running suid=myself.

A little investigation showed that the /usr/tmp directory on our server
machine had somehow been set up with owner=root, group=cti (our
"software developer" group), and permissions=770.  As a result, sort
couldn't write there when run suid=news;  it dropped back 10 and punted
the files into /tmp without ever informing me of the fact.

I changed the permissions on this directory to 777, recompiled expire so
that it specified "sort -T /usr/tmp", and rebuilt my history file.  Lo and
behold, it worked perfectly... the scratch files were placed in /usr/tmp
and the sort didn't overload our root partition.

Thanks to everybody who wrote in with suggestions.  I received two notes
suggesting that I try "-T /usr/tmp" rather than "-T/usr/tmp" (I had, and
had neglected to mention so in my posting), one saying "Everybody I know
simply symlinks /tmp over to /usr/tmp", one saying "I symlinked it and
it seems to work OK", and one urging me _not_ to symlink, because I
might get burned if I ever needed temp space when running single-user
with the /usr filesystem dismounted... but instead to set up a separate
partition and mount /tmp onto it.

Again, thank you all!



-- 
Dave Platt                                             VOICE: (415) 493-8805
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