Jon Peatfield wrote:
> As far as I can see libutempter as shipped in SL5 (and TUV and FC6 etc), 
> is only usable by either root or things which are in the utempter group
> (the permissions on the directory /usr/libexec/utempter/ are 710).
> 
> Nothing in my install is setgid utempter and I'm not sure what apart 
> from xterm uses it (xterm has libutempter as a dependency).  Anyway 
> xterm ends
> up not putting in any utmp records (oops) gnome-terminal does but it 
> uses gnome-pty-helper to do the utmp updating (why can't we have one 
> mechanism used by everything?)
> 
> Now I was about to query TUV about this when I noticed that there is 
> already a newer xterm package in 5x/SRPMS/vendor/xterm-215-5.el5.src.rpm 
> though nothing appears in the list of bugfixes/errata/enhancements that 
> I can see from TUV (maybe somewhere I can't see).
> 
> The changelog for this contains:
> 
>   * Wed May 16 2007 Miroslav Lichvar <[log in to unmask]> 215-5.el5
>   - make xterm binary sgid utempter (#222847)
> 
> Is there any reason why I shouldn't build/test the xterm-215-5.el5 
> package?  Does anyone know if this is likely to be in SL-5.1?
> 

This will be in the fastbug's.
Fastbug's are non-security errata that just sortof show up in TUV's source rpm 
area.  They call them Fasttrack.  Basically, they are rpm's that are going to 
be in the next release, and they are putting them out early so that people can 
use them if they want.  So yes, it will very probrubly be in SL 5.1.

> Note that in SL3 anyone/anything could call utempter.  I didn't check 
> SL4...
> 
> BTW how long does it normally take for TUB to put up srpms into their 
> ftp tree?  I can't see anything obvious for the recent (cups, poppler, 
> xpdf,
> kdegraphics) errata but I don't know if one normally expects to have to 
> wait a day or two for them to appear...
> 
TUV usually has the source rpm's in their place when they send out an errata 
announcement.  Yesterday's announcement, dealing with the pdf security, was an 
exception where we had to wait a whole day.  I don't know what the delay was on 
their end, but delays like that have happened before, but they are rare.
They are up there now, and we are compiling already.  Expect the errata and the 
announcement later on today.

Troy
-- 
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Troy Dawson  [log in to unmask]  (630)840-6468
Fermilab  ComputingDivision/LCSI/CSI DSS Group
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