directory permissions for LogHistory

[Kevan Riley]

When we enable Log History for a site, the LogHistory directories that are created have the following permissions:

drwxr-S—

Why is this?  It is causing us trouble.

PS this is CL 5.6r2  on AIX 5.3.

Kevan

Topic

[Anonymous]

What kind of issue is it causing you ?

[Kevan Riley]

Well two issues.  Simplest one is that if you are a user other than “hci” even though you are in the same group ‘staff’ you cannot ‘cd’ into ‘LogHistory’.  If it were the lowrcase “s” I thing that allows for changing into the directory, but not for the capital “S”.  We use the lowercase “s” for our OutboundSave and InbounSave directories w/o problems.

Second is, well, I was hoping to understand why this was done.  What I’d really like to do is create LogHistory directories as links in advance.  We like to keep our archive stuff outside of our process directory space.  But, it seems like it was not working right when I tried creating the links in advance.

Kevan

[Rob Abbott]

Most likely has to do with the umask of the user that is creating the directories.

Rob Abbott
Cloverleaf Emeritus

[Robert Milfajt]

S and s are referred to as the “Sticky Bit” in Unix.  The Sticky Bit is usually associated with world writeable directories, such as the /tmp directory. This prevents users from deleting files they don’t own. Users can write to those directories but only they can delete or update those files they own. It’s commonly used for scratch directories like /tmp to provide some security for otherwise world-writable directories.

The S means that someone applied the Sticky Bit security to r–.  The s means they applied the Sticky Bit security to r-x.  The underlying problem is that you are not getting xecute permission, which is preventing you from changing to the directory, the S vs. s just hightlights the problem.  You need to set the umask of the user to make sure new directories are created with group permission of r-x or rwx.  This will change your S to s.

Hope this helps,

Robert Milfajt
Northwestern Medicine
Chicago, IL

[Kevan Riley]

Yep that was it.  Thanks for the additional clarification.  Rob was right, but I was not clear how the umask interacted with the setting of the sticky bit.  Your added information connected it for me.

Thanks

Kevan

[Gary Atkinson]

I have issue where the process log will not cycle.

[Gary Atkinson]

I adjusted the max size to 15MB and bounced the process, and…. the cycling is now working!  Thanks to Jimmy in support  8)

[Author]

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