Files are created with the wrong permissions

From: Alan Stern
Date: Mon Apr 01 2013 - 14:08:38 EST


Ted or anybody else:

In preparation for a software upgrade, I just repartitioned and
reformmated my server. After restoring the contents from a backup and
booting, I find that new files are not being created with the right
permissions, which obviously causes lots of problems.

Here's an example of a simple test program:


#include <stdio.h>
#include <fcntl.h>

int main()
{
unsigned m;
int fd;

m = umask(0);
printf("Original umask: %03o\n", m);

fd = open("b", O_RDWR | O_CREAT | O_EXCL, 0777);
printf("fd: %d\n", fd);
if (fd != -1)
close(fd);

return 0;
}


Since the umask is set to 0, the "b" file should be created with its
permissions set to -rwxrwxrwx. That's not what happens.

The results vary as I run the program in different directories. For
example, running as root in /root, I get:

-r-xr-x--- 1 root root 0 Apr 1 13:56 b

But in /var, I get:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 0 Apr 1 14:05 b

In other places I get:

-rwx------ 1 root root 0 Apr 1 13:57 b

or

-rwxr-x--- 1 root root 0 Apr 1 14:00 b

or

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 0 Apr 1 13:58 b

or even the expected result:

-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Apr 1 13:42 b

Can anybody suggest the reason for this and how to fix it?

One fact that might be relevant: The original filesystems were ext3,
but I reformatted the partitions as ext4. The restore was done using
tar with the --xattrs option. Could that be responsible? lsattr shows
only:

# lsattr -d /root
-------------e- /root

Note: This happens under both the 3.6 and 3.8 kernels.

Thanks for any help.

Alan Stern

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