From: Craig A. Berry [craig.berry@nospam.SignalTreeSolutions.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2001 11:35 PM
To: Info-VAX@Mvb.Saic.Com
Subject: Mozilla 0.9.5 and file protections

The newest version of Mozilla still has problems if you install it 
under the SYSTEM account and then try to run it from another, 
non-privileged account.  It gives the "Starting..." message, chugs for 
a bit, and then just quits with no error messages.  By using security 
auditing, I determined that the following files under 
SYS$COMMON:[MOZILLA] are installed with protections other than what 
they need:

                           has     needs
component.reg              W:RE    W:RWE
[.components]xpti.dat      W:      W:R
[.components]xptitemp.dat  W:RE    W:RWE

Once I change the protections, Mozilla runs fine.  I suspect most 
people don't encounter this because they run from the same account they 
install from and thus own the files, but if this doesn't get fixed I 
bet it will generate a lot of support calls when Mozilla 1.0 is finally 
released.  In any case, it would be nice to get a NOPRIV error when 
Mozilla can't even start due to a file protection problem.

Quite possibly write access is not really needed for one or more of the 
files that currently requires it, so it may be that the right thing to 
do here would involve a code change as well as (or instead of) an 
installer change.