vstafs as root filesystem

Well... I'm taking three weeks off from work to catch up on my overflowing
vacation tally. So--of course--I finally get to spend some time on various
mysteries.

Mystery #1: what ails VSTa when trying to use a vstafs filesystem as the
root?

Answer: two things, both related to a filesystem which has real protection.
First, I accidentally created all the system files as myself; the system
daemons couldn't access them (they're capable of root, but this capability
is disabled until explicitly activated).

Myster #2: Even with that, /vsta/lib/termcap doesn't appear to be honored.

Answer: The BSD code in libtermcap.a does an open(..., 0). 0 maps into
neither ACC_READ nor ACC_WRITE on the server side. vstafs simply was
refusing to permit reads when such access was not requested. I patched
vstafs to map m_arg == 0 into m_arg = ACC_READ. I also fixed the code in
the termcap library, but termcap isn't in libc, so it's not a shared
library, and I'd have to go relink all the apps.

With that, vstafs is now my root partition, and seems to be working OK.
"vi" is still behaving funny, though. More hunting TBD.

                                                Andy
Received on Mon Jul 24 11:43:13 1995