Re: sshd "owned by root" error

[Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu>]

On Fri, 6 May 2005, Ordal, Peter wrote:

> I just finished an install of Cygwin's OpenSSH on XP SP 2. Along the way I
> got the error:
>
> /var/empty must be owned by root and not group or world-writable.
>
> This has been discussed several places before, I know. Still, I had a
> different experience than previous posts. I found that what "owned by root"
> meant was actually owned by the account running sshd. So, when I ran
> /usr/sbin/sshd -D under my domain account, I had to chown /var/empty to my
> account.

The above might be a good candidate for the FAQ...

> I tried to get sshd to run as a service under the system account, but it
> wouldn't start. The console error message (on typing net start sshd) was not
> helpful, and the event log just said "starting service `sshd' failed: execv:
> 255, error 255." Even with /var/empty chowned to system, no luck. So I was
> forced to change the sshd service to run as my domain account, and to
> similarly take ownership of /var/empty.

Please review and follow the Cygwin problem reporting guidelines outlined
in <http://cygwin.com/problems.html>.  Please pay special attention to the
part where you're asked to attach (as an uncompressed text *attachment*)
the output of "cygcheck -svr" on your system.

In the absense of the above...  (* dusts off crystal ball, peers inward
intently *)  My cloudy little helper here shows that you have user mounts
(installed Cygwin as "Just for me") or some DLL permission issues.  Please
check out <http://cygwin.com/faq/faq_3.html#SEC33>.  If your mounts *are*
system-level mounts, please check the permissions on the relevant DLLs in
/bin (and "chmod a+x" them so that the SYSTEM user has execute access).
FWIW, the same advice was given in the followup to the Cygwin list thread
that you quoted.

> I found this error message originates on line 1166 of sshd.c in the openssh
> package. Perhaps it should be changed. Saying "owned by root" doesn't make
> much sense here.

Agreed.  <http://cygwin.com/acronyms/#PTC>.
	Igor
P.S. Please make sure you follow the official Cygwin documentation (e.g.,
/usr/share/doc/Cygwin/openssh-*.README).  The documentation found on the
web (and especially that from erdelynet.com) has caused countless grief to
Cygwin users.
-- 
				http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
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     |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'		Igor Pechtchanski, Ph.D.
    '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) fL	a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-.  Meow!

"The Sun will pass between the Earth and the Moon tonight for a total
Lunar eclipse..." -- WCBS Radio Newsbrief, Oct 27 2004, 12:01 pm EDT

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