[5783] in Athena Bugs
AFS writes fail silently
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Carr)
Tue Aug 21 05:09:43 1990
To: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 21 Aug 90 05:09:31 EDT
From: John Carr <jfc@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
Writing to a file in a cell that enforces group permissions (testers, rel-eng)
can fail silently if the file is owned by another user and has group write
off.
Specific example: I was using vi to edit a number of files in the X sources.
These were owned by other users, but the directory acl gave me write
permission. After I wrote the file and quit vi, I found the file unchanged.
I never saw an error message. This cost me an hour of work after I figured
out the problem, because I had to go back and re-edit all the files AFS had
refused to change.
There are 2 bugs: (1) access checks, including the one by the open system
call, return OK for files to which access is denied by the group permission
bits (2) either [1] error status is not returned for such files on close or
[2] vi does not check the return value of close.
I suspect bugs in checking read permission in similar cases.
