*BSD News Article 60210


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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
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From: tom@tarush.chattanooga.net (Tom Rush)
Subject: Re: pppd in 2.1 buggy !?
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Organization: Rush Co.
Message-ID: <DLsFy1.2Es@tarush.chattanooga.net>
References: <4e7opi$8fp@imp.fl.net.au>
Date: Fri, 26 Jan 1996 12:27:36 GMT
Lines: 24

Andrew Foster (adf@imp.fl.net.au) wrote:
> I've found that pppd in FreeBSD 2.1 appears to be buggy.

> It does not seem to run /etc/ip-up and ip-down.

They're supposed to be in /etc/ppp, not /etc. Maybe that's what you meant.
If not, that could be your problem.

> I've had to write things to get around this for routing (this happens on 2
> machines with 16 modems on each).

If ip-up is a shell script and attempts to call route, it will fail unless
you start pppd as root.  Even though pppd is setuid root, route won't
change the routing tables unless the real uid is root, not just the
effective uid.

I got around having to su every time by making ip-up a C program, and calling
setuid(geteuid) before exec'ing route.  This is a potential security hole,
just as the man page for pppd warns,  but if you check the args carefully
in the program, it shouldn't be a problem.

--
Tom Rush
tom@tarush.chattanooga.net