Re: flashplayer9? (Mystery solved)

On Sat, Dec 16, 2006 at 10:02:40AM -0800, Marc Shapiro wrote:
[...]

I just ran locate again this morning. It found all the file and
symlinks in all the system directories that the install of
flashplayer-nonfree placed there. It DID NOT find the files in my
user directory, or in my wife's user directory tree. These are the
places that it did find it yesterday after I manually ran updatedb. I
ran updatedb MANUALLY this morning, and now it finds all copies of the
file, in system AND user directories. Why would it find the files
after a manual run of updatedb, and then lose them overnight?

Here is a copy of my /etc/updatedb.conf:

[...]
# run find as this user
LOCALUSER="nobody"
export LOCALUSER


I suspect this is the pertinent bit. per nam updatedb, $LOCALUSER
controls which user is used to search local directories. When the cron
job runs, it uses "nobody", when you run it, it runs as you. So you
(most likely) have read permissions on your local dirs, but I bet
"nobody" doesn't.

BINGO!!!

Both /home an ~/ have permissions of 755, giving read access to everyone
(my wife and I are the only persons with physical access). However,
~/.mozilla has permissions of 700, no access to anyone but me!

Is it reasonable to let updatedb run as root, so that ALL directories
would be included, or is this a Bad Idea (TM)?


FWIW, my .mozilla is 755 but I don't know why that is.

Probably "safer" to just chmod .mozilla than have another process
running as root. I don't know what the dangers of running updatedb as
root could possibly be but...

A

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