permissions and login under NT 4.0

[Corinna Vinschen]

Bryan Zimmer wrote:
> I have been unable to use the login program from cygwin. Regardless of
> whether I enter my NT password or my bash password created with passwd, it
> doesn't let me login and I have to terminate the bash window.

You can't use login from command line unless you have changed the
permission of your user. I suggest reading inetutils-1.3.2.README
and login.README. You will find them in /usr/doc/Cygwin

> I have also been unable to affect the file permissions in, for example the
> /etc/passwd file (but it could be any file). When I use chmod, the
> permissions are not taking effect as seen by ls -l [file].

This is in the online docs. The CYGWIN environment variable contains
space separated entries in the style "[no]foo". Set it to contain
"ntsec". Note that setting real ntfs permissions only works on ntfs
file system. To fake permissions on fat fs set "ntea" additionally.

> I have been unsuccessful in adding entries to passwd and group. I read the
> paper on ntsec permissions and I went so far as to download ntsec. So far,
> that hasn't been much help, but I admit I don't know much about it. I tried
> IGRANT to myself all privileges for files and directories but my chmod
> permissions still weren't showing up in ls -l.
> 
> Needless to say, I have not been able to use the su program. Even when I
> added a root to passwd I must have got it wrong because it didn't work.
> Chown and chgrp are also not working.

su can't work on nt. It's part of the shellutils package so it's
distributed with Cygwin but it's rather disfunctional. There would
be a need to perform a port to NT but afaics neither Chris nor DJ
and I will do this in near future so I would gladly appreciate if
a net contributor would step in here.
(BTW: I don't want to be the only person using the new
 cygwin_logon_user/cygwin_impersonate_user/seteuid stuff!)

> I found programs called getfacl and setfacl and tried those out. getfacl
> showed me file permissions, but I didn't know how to use setfacl. Several
> attempts were unsuccessful.

That's rather simple:
- setfacl without arguments gives you a first hint.
- The online ntsec documentation contains a pointer to the sun
  documentation which contain all man pages about the sun acl support:

  http://docs.sun.com

> By the way, where is all the initialization done? I am used to linux with
> its plethora of rc files and inittab and the like.

Cygwin isn't an OS but a DLL so it only has to provide a base 
initialisation. It doesn't care for config files except for
/etc/passwd and /etc/group which are loaded by an application
automagically on the first access to these files.

Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Developer                        mailto:cygwin@sources.redhat.com
Red Hat, Inc.
mailto:vinschen@cygnus.com


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