On Sat, 23 Aug 2025 15:34:43 -0700
"Utopian Galt" (21:4/108) <Utopian.Galt@f108.n4.z21.fidonet> wrote:

BY: Nightfox (21:1/137)

|11N|09> |10That shouldn't be totally preventing you from using
Linux.. Just need|07 |11N|09> |10to set all the directory
permissions according to the user account|07 |11N|09> |10that's
running your BBS software.|07 I cant run the binkd or process mail
due to this issue. :(

--- WWIV 5.9.03748[Windows]
* Origin: inland utopia * california * iutopia.duckdns.org:2023
(21:4/108)

I run binkd and synchronet on Linux with no problems. I guess it's a
skills issue on your part?
--
End Of The Line BBS - Plano, TX
telnet endofthelinebbs.com 23
--- SBBSecho 3.29-Linux
* Origin: End Of The Line BBS - endofthelinebbs.com (21:2/101)

I think file and directory permissions is the bottle neck that is preventing me from migrating to linux for my bbs.


--- WWIV 5.9.03748[Windows]
* Origin: inland utopia * california * iutopia.duckdns.org:2023 (21:4/108)

Re: linux permissions issue
By: Utopian Galt to All on Sat Aug 23 2025 01:17 pm

I think file and directory permissions is the bottle neck that is preventing me from migrating to linux for my bbs.

That shouldn't be totally preventing you from using Linux.. Just need to set all the directory permissions according to the user account that's running your BBS software.

Nightfox
--- SBBSecho 3.29-Linux
* Origin: Digital Distortion: digdist.synchro.net (21:1/137)

BY: Nightfox (21:1/137)

|11N|09> |10That shouldn't be totally preventing you from using Linux.. Just need|07
|11N|09> |10to set all the directory permissions according to the user account|07
|11N|09> |10that's running your BBS software.|07
I cant run the binkd or process mail due to this issue. :(


--- WWIV 5.9.03748[Windows]
* Origin: inland utopia * california * iutopia.duckdns.org:2023 (21:4/108)

Hey Utopian!

On Sat, Aug 23 2025 15:17:16 -0500, you wrote:

I think file and directory permissions is the bottle neck that is preventing me from migrating to linux for my bbs.

As a long time linux user, I'm glad it's only a 'bottleneck' in your own mind. ;)

Regards,
Nick

... Sarcasm: because beating people up is illegal.
--- SBBSecho 3.29-Linux
* Origin: _thePharcyde telnet://bbs.pharcyde.org (Wisconsin) (21:1/700)

I think file and directory permissions is the bottle neck that is preventing me from migrating to linux for my bbs.

As a long time linux user, I'm glad it's only a 'bottleneck' in your own mi

hahah ... I find all the use of "permissions" in a home operation system retarded. I understand in a network or work environment, but to have to jump thru hoops to get to a SD card, flash drive, or even a directory is just plain nuts.

This isn't only Linux, this is Windows as well.

... It's hard to RTFM when you can't find the FM..

--- Renegade v1.35/DOS
* Origin: The Titantic BBS Telnet - ttb.rgbbs.info (21:1/144)

Hey Exodus!

On Sun, 24 Aug 2025 08:19:52 , you wrote:

hahah ... I find all the use of "permissions" in a home operation
system retarded. I understand in a network or work environment, but
to have to jump thru hoops to get to a SD card, flash drive, or even
a directory is just plain nuts.

This isn't only Linux, this is Windows as well.

I can agree with that. However, on any of my "home operation systems" there is and really needs to be only one user. So unless you compile/install something as root or administrator, in any part of the directory stucture that would normally give you access problems, you probably shouldn't have much issue there.

If the OP installed Linux *just* to setup a BBS, then there only needs to be one user. So my guess is he probably unzipped/compiled/installed as root and is now trying to do things as a regular user, or installed to "/sbbs" and didn't give his user permissions to write to a directory directly off the root drive.

Installing to "/home/<user>/sbbs" (or even "c:\users\<user>" on Windows), most of those issues wouldn't happen unless he changed/edited some files as root/administrator.

I'm not saying you /can't/ install to "/sbbs" or "c:\sbbs", because you definitely can.. but then you would most likely have to manually allow your user to be able to write to it.

I'm sure there's a Synchronet wiki page describing all of this, too. But if the OP was too lazy to read it while trying to install to a foreign territory, then I'm too lazy to point them there. ;)

Regards,
Nick

... Sarcasm: because beating people up is illegal.
--- GoldED+/LNX 1.1.5-b20250409
* Origin: _thePharcyde telnet://bbs.pharcyde.org (Wisconsin) (21:1/200)

I'm sure there's a Synchronet wiki page describing all of this, too. But if the OP was too lazy to read it while trying to install to a foreign territo then I'm too lazy to point them there. ;)

JHAHAHAHA I hear that ... was just pointing out how nuts these OSes are now a days ... no need for any of that on a personal computer. I remember one window setup I had a few years back, all the permissions were screwed on my external hdd (which had movies and music on) as it was a shared drive. When I removed it as a shared drive and made it just stand alone, all shit broke loose on not being able to access the files, even though I could see them. So I just find permission/user accounts plain stupid. :)

... One nation under God; with liberty, fries & a Coke to go.

--- Renegade v1.35/DOS
* Origin: The Titantic BBS Telnet - ttb.rgbbs.info (21:1/144)

Re: Re: linux permissions issue
By: Exodus to Accession on Sun Aug 24 2025 08:19 am

hahah ... I find all the use of "permissions" in a home operation system retarded. I understand in a network or work environment, but to have to jump thru hoops to get to a SD card, flash drive, or even a directory is just plain nuts.

This isn't only Linux, this is Windows as well.

The lack of default and universal "permissions" enforcement is why DOS and Windows were such ripe breeding grounds for malware. You need security, even in a home operation [sic] system, to keep malicious processes from doing nefarious things. It's a feature, not a bug.
--
digital man (rob)

This Is Spinal Tap quote #33:
Nigel Tufnel: Well, so what? What's wrong with bein' sexy?
Norco, CA WX: 75.3øF, 71.0% humidity, 3 mph W wind, 0.00 inches rain/24hrs
--- SBBSecho 3.29-Linux
* Origin: Vertrauen - [vert/cvs/bbs].synchro.net (21:1/183)

Digital Man wrote to Exodus <=-

processes from doing nefarious things. It's a feature, not a bug. --

I GOT A FEVER AND THE ONLY PRESCRIPTION IS "cd /;chmod -R 777 *"!



--- MultiMail/Win v0.52
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (21:4/122)

processes from doing nefarious things. It's a feature, not a bug. --

I GOT A FEVER AND THE ONLY PRESCRIPTION IS "cd /;chmod -R 777 *"!

:P Love this... its always permissions - or DNS; DNS... thats the right answer.



|07p|15AULIE|1142|07o
|08.........

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2024/05/29 (Linux/64)
* Origin: 2o fOr beeRS bbs>>>20ForBeers.com:1337 (21:2/150)

On 26 Aug 2025 at 09:57a, Digital Man pondered and said...

Re: Re: linux permissions issue
By: Exodus to Accession on Sun Aug 24 2025 08:19 am

hahah ... I find all the use of "permissions" in a home operation syste retarded. I understand in a network or work environment, but to have t jump thru hoops to get to a SD card, flash drive, or even a directory i just plain nuts.

This isn't only Linux, this is Windows as well.

The lack of default and universal "permissions" enforcement is why DOS
and Windows were such ripe breeding grounds for malware. You need security, even in a home operation [sic] system, to keep malicious processes from doing nefarious things. It's a feature, not a bug.

Or just to prevent the user from making a mistake and bricking their
own system.

That said, I know people who have written books on Unix security that
just login as root because, well, it's their damned computer.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

Re: Re: linux permissions issue
By: tenser to Digital Man on Sat Aug 30 2025 01:33 am

That said, I know people who have written books on Unix security that
just login as root because, well, it's their damned computer.

I've also noticed that the more expertise one has with security, the more paranoid (read: secure) "their damned computer" environment is. Unless you've airgapped the computer, "just login as root" is a really bad idea, for anyone.
--
digital man (rob)

Steven Wright quote #27:
Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
Norco, CA WX: 95.9øF, 33.0% humidity, 4 mph W wind, 0.00 inches rain/24hrs
--- SBBSecho 3.29-Linux
* Origin: Vertrauen - [vert/cvs/bbs].synchro.net (21:1/183)

On 31 Aug 2025 at 01:34p, Digital Man pondered and said...

Re: Re: linux permissions issue
By: tenser to Digital Man on Sat Aug 30 2025 01:33 am

That said, I know people who have written books on Unix security that just login as root because, well, it's their damned computer.

I've also noticed that the more expertise one has with security, the more paranoid (read: secure) "their damned computer" environment is. Unless you've airgapped the computer, "just login as root" is a really bad
idea, for anyone. --

It depends on the threat model, doesn't it? If you sandbox
applications you've got a different set of considerations.

MIT used to write the root password for the Athena clusters on
the wall, because they got sick of precocious undergrads breaking
root all the time. It removed the incentive, and abuse went way
down, and root on a workstation wasn't that interesting: all of
the important data lived on servers on a network somewhere and
local root didn't give you access to that, since the network used
a different authentication scheme understood by the network file
system (AFS with Kerberos).

Honestly, the whole idea of "root" is just really bad. An omnipotent "superuser" account that could bypass essentially all permissions?
It worked ok on a centrally managed timesharing used by a small,
tight-knit group of researchers, but it didn't grow up once Unix
escaped the PDP-11/45, and makes no sense in a networked environment.

Plan 9 did away with it entirely. There, a "host owner" is just a normal
user who has access to the hardware resources of a given host, but
that's it: host owners can't bypass file permissions. If I log into a terminal, for example, then I "own" that machine. Per-process file
namespaces are sort of like capabilities (I had a long discussion with
Ben Laurie about this at one point, and we agreed they were more or
less isomorphic to e.g. Capsicum-style capabilities), so you can
easily fence off what a program like a web browser sees and has access
to. It was a nice system; shame it never really caught on. Some of the
good ideas made it into Linux, but are poor imitations of the original.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

Plan 9 did away with it entirely. There, a "host owner" is just a normal user who has access to the hardware resources of a given host, but
that's it: host owners can't bypass file permissions. If I log into a terminal, for example, then I "own" that machine. Per-process file namespaces are sort of like capabilities (I had a long discussion with
Ben Laurie about this at one point, and we agreed they were more or
less isomorphic to e.g. Capsicum-style capabilities), so you can
easily fence off what a program like a web browser sees and has access
to. It was a nice system; shame it never really caught on. Some of the good ideas made it into Linux, but are poor imitations of the original.

It's really sad that plan 9 never really took off. If someone were to start again, what feature(s) from plan 9 do you think would be essential to copy?

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

On 02 Sep 2025 at 08:42a, scarface pondered and said...

It's really sad that plan 9 never really took off. If someone were to start again, what feature(s) from plan 9 do you think would be essential to copy?

Yeah. It was inevitable, but still a shame: Unix was too entrenched
with too big of a userbase by the time Plan 9 came on the scene, and
AT&T was determined not to "lose control" of it the way they did with
Unix, so they really messed up the licensing terms early on. Had they
released 1e with something like the BSD license back in 1992, the
world may well have been very different. Oh well.

The question of what features one would preserve in a new system is surprisingly difficult to answer. Plan 9 was, fundamentally, a research system, and research systems are designed and built to address specific questions that are of interest in the time and place where the research
is done. For Plan 9, what they were trying to do (in a nutshell) was see
if they could adopt the Unix ideas to a world where distributed networks
of computers were the norm, and everyone now had a high-resolution bitmapped graphics display, not an 80x24 serial terminal. Whereas the Unix world
was evolving so that networks consisted of lots of little city-state timesharing systems with bolt-ons like X11 for interaction ("a network
of Unixes", if you will) plan 9 was about building a unified "Unix" from
the network. But that time has passed and that place no longer exists,
so it's unclear what lessons are still applicable.

Regardless, if I were to build a new system from scratch tomorrow, some
of the things I might try to take away are:

1. A single unified network protocol for access resources in a
file-like manner,
2. Per-process(group) mutable namespaces for resources,
3. The security model.

That's probably it. The implementation itself isn't worth preserving.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)