[Pan-users] Re: Re: [0.14.2.91] No signature?

[Duncan]

Chill posted <address@hidden>, excerpted below,  on Mon, 04
Oct 2004 15:48:11 +0200:

> Hello Duncan,
> 
> First of all: Thank you for your answer.
> 
> Duncan wrote:
> 
>>  Check its permissions. If it's executable, PAN tries to execute it,
>>  allowing you to use a fortune program to change your sig, among other
>>  things.
> 
> Haha! it was on a FAt partition and made executable. Even though I tried 
> to remove the executable, it reappeared... I tried to move it on a Linux 
> partition and remove the executable and it works :-)

Note that as I mentioned, permissions on a FAT partition are fs-wide
(because FAT doesn't store that info so the system has to fake it,
setting it at mount). You can't change it for a single file.

man mount, look at the fs specific info for vfat and friends.  FAT doesn't
store per-file permissions, so they are handled for the entire partition,
at mount time.  There are default permissions for the partition and the
default owner and group are that of the launching process.  These can be
changed for the filesystem as a whole, at mount time, using the various
options. Older mount versions couldn't treat dirs separate from files, but
newer versions have separate options for each, since the exe bit means
something different for dirs than for files.

Back before I ripped out MSWormOS (and along with it the FAT partitions),
I had my fstab set up such that the FAT partitions were set to user/group
"winuser".  Thus, I could control access to the partitions based on
whether the user was registered in the winuser group or not.  Not that I
really /needed/ such control on a single-user system, but it /did/ mean
daemons and the like running in their own user/groups didn't have access,
making the machine that little bit more cracker resistant.  That was the
idea, anyway.  Unfortunately, not having the ability back then to set
different dir and file permissions crimped security a bit, but I was
surprised to note the new separate file/dir settings recently when
browsing the man page looking for something else, so things have gotten
better since I killed anything using FAT here.

(FWIW, I'm 100% reiserfs here, some 20 partitions including backups worth
on my main drive, additional partitions on my backup drive -- I have four
copies of some partitions, working and backup versions on each of my
working and backup drives.  I'll eventually switch to reiser4, but not
until some of the concerns, security and stability-wise, that have been
raised, in terms of putting it into the mainstream kernel, have been
addressed.)

... Amazing sometimes the unexpected nuggets of info, like that on FAT
permissions above, one finds on normally unrelated newsgroups.  (Another
one, I use gmane.org's list2news gateway, so get this "list" as a
newsgroup, as I do all my regular mailing lists.)  That's one of the
things that keeps me using newsgroups.  Every time I think they are
getting old and boring, along comes an unexpected nugget like this! <g> 
It's neat to discover them, and neat to be able to post them, as well. 
That sort of "non-linear community input" functionality is a big reason
newsgroups (and lists) are so much more effective at tech support than a
help desk could ever hope to be (with the exception of course being when
the help desk has access, thru techs, to areas the user can't reach, such
as to fix the news server or ISP side of the internet connection <g>).

>>  If not, it should add it as text. If it's on a FAT
>>  partition or some such, where perms are partition-wide, you can
>>  simply use cat, as in "cat /path/to/sigfile".
> 
> I don't understand this one: I tried to put: cat 
> /home/chill/mnt/MIKKEL/globeTrotter/Underskrift/nytestamente.org.txt
> in the place where I usually give the signature file, but it didn't 
> change anything...
> 
> You know why?

I don't know why.  It used to work for me. <shrug> I did /not/ use the
shell script work-around JA mentions.  Maybe something changed and PAN
parses the entry differently, now, not allowing for command parameters,
thus requiring the shell script.  However, the "cat /path/to/file" worked
for me here until I recently changed it.  Since PAN development has kind
of ossified, I'm quite sure I changed it some time /after/ the current
"beta" came out, thus, that I was using the cat method with the current
latest release.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin