root-owned ~/.cfengine on HP-UX?

[Luke A. Kanies]

Hi,

This is very weird.  I have cfengine compiled exactly the same on both
HP-UX and Solaris 5.8/sparc.  I compiled OpenSSL, BerkeleyDB, and cfengine
all using the exact same arguments on both platforms.  On Solaris,
everything behaves normally, but on HP-UX, I get some very strange
behaviour.

When I run cfagent as a normal user, on a very basic script:

#!/usr/local/install/cfengine/2.0.4/sbin/cfagent -f $0 -v

control:
        actionsequence = ( shellcommands )

shellcommands:
        "/bin/echo ${arch}"

the directory ~/.cfengine gets created, but instead of being owned by the
user running the script, it's owned by root, even though the cfagent
binary is actually owned by bin:bin.  I've also chowned db and openssl to
bin:bin.  Nothing in this chain is owned by root, nothing is setuid to
anything, much less to root.

I'm incredibly confused.  It's not breaking any security rules -- you can
normally chown directories to other users, even root -- but it only does
so on HP-UX, not Solaris.

Anyone have any ideas?  Has anyone else run cfengine scripts as a normal
user on HP-UX?  Is there something I could have done wrong in the compile
or anything?  The only abnormal thing I can think of is that I removed the
-lPW from the src/Makefile, in order to get it to compile.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.  Obviously, this limits my ability
to have users use cfengine (which I find extremely useful), because the
users suddenly can't write to their own .cfengine directory.

Thanks,
Luke

-- 
Windows 95: n.
 32 bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16 bit patch to an
 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor,
 written by a 2 bit company, that can't stand 1 bit of competition.