From: mattocks@tigger.rsmas.miami.edu (Craig A. Mattocks)
Subject: Re: files' owner changes on its own (reprise)
Keywords: ownership, directory, chown, NeXTstep 3.0
Organization: University of Miami, RSMAS
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 92 04:17:43 GMT

In article <1992Oct13.190606.5934@news.miami.edu>  
mattocks@tigger.rsmas.miami.edu (I) wrote:
> Hi!
>    For those of you suffering from "mysterious drifting directory  
> ownership disease" under NS 3.0 (wherein the ownership of files and  
> directories changes every few minutes or so and "chown -R owner  
> /directory" doesn't work, Mark Adler's posts helped me solve my problem.  
> As reported by Mark, you have to change the label of your external hard  
> drive to match the hostname. Specifically, if you have a disk named  
> "harddisk" in your SCSI daisy chain and your machine's name is  
"hostname",
> do this:
> 
>    umount /dev/sd1a
>    disk - H hostname /dev/rsd1a
>    mount /dev/sd1a /harddisk
> 
> then issue all your chown commands. I hope this helps someone and MANY  
> THANKS to Mark for being so helpful.
> 
and I received this helpful criticism:

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Unless there's something I'm missing here, this may solve the problem but  
it has little to do with your explanation (or his, or whoever's :-) )

The hostname and disk volume names have no necessry connection, to my  
knowledge. They are both completely arbitrary. Assuming that the device  
you had the problems with is an external disk, the reason for the problem  
was that it was being automounted as opposed to being set up the same way  
as the internal disk. When the disk was automounted, whoever logged in was  
suddenly set up as the owner and all sorts of nasty things start  
happening.

I went through the same thing about 9 months ago.

Doing it the documented way will make it work at all times. I can't tell  
if you're suggesting doing the commands above each time you login or not.  
If so, you definitely do not have the appropriate answer.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Well, this critic was indeed correct - my problems continued. When I  
logged in/out, the users' directories' ownership changed. I noticed that  
my /etc/fstab file contained no entry for my external hard disk, so I  
added one (same as internal drive entry, but with sd1a instead of sd0a).  
Then I issued this command as root:
   niload fstab . </etc/fstab
and rebooted. Things seem to have stabilized right now. Was this the right  
thing to do? And what about this mysterious "autonfsmount" which runs  
every time I boot the system? Can/should I kill this beast? What sword do  
I use? Any NetInfo wizards out there to offer incantations?
   Thanks for any helpful suggestions! I am ROOKIE system administrator -  
I could really use NeXT's sysadmin course...
   Craig A. Mattocks, Atmospheric Research Scientist

PS WRT the buffer speed-up isssue (another thread), I entered the  
following with in the NeXT ROM monitor:

NeXT>b sd() sdmach nbuf=256

on a 64 MB system and I'm running along nicely. I think nbuf=128  
performance seemed faster, though. Why?

   Phone            : (305) 361-4043 or 4038
   Fax              : (305) 361-4622
   Internet e-mail  : mattocks@rcf.rsmas.miami.edu
   Internet NeXTmail: mattocks@tigger.rsmas.miami.edu
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 | (o)(o)        a day that broke up your mind?
 C      _)    Destroyed the notion of circular time...
  | ,___|        It's just that evil life that's got you in its sway."
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 /____\
Don't have a cow, man!
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