e i g h t - c u b e d . c o m 

Fixing things

I patched a couple of Alphaservers up-to-date yesterday afternoon, including updating the SRM firmware, which was a tad out of date. On reboot, I was surprised to see a bunch of audit messages appearing when TCP/IP Services attempted to restart. The audit messages were indicating that a number of services were experiencing problems attempting to create log files or read configuration files in their service-specific directories.

Once the machines were up, I started investigating, and found that nearly every directory associated with these services was owned by the incorrect user. I hurriedly set the file ownerships, and restarted the affected services.

I'd love to know how this got screwed up, and more interestingly, how it worked (or didn't) and got fixed at the last boot.

Unfortunately, the consoles here are not connected to a permanent recording device, so historical research is a little difficult.