Weird Problems...

T

The Madhatter

Registered
When I try to startup Classic I get the following error message:

"You are running Classic without superuser(root) privileges. Ensure TruBlueEnvironment is setuid and owned by root, or reinstall your Mac OS X System Software."

What the heck is going on? I have used Classic countless times before. The only thing I have changed is I was trying to share my whole hard drive on my home network and got into root user and did Get Info on my hard drive and gave everyone Read privileges. Then I did the copy to all enclosed folders thing too. Just a few minutes before this Classic message popped up, I tried opening iTunes and this is what I got,

"The folder 'iTunes' is on a locked disk or you do not have write permissions for this folder."

I have iTunes 2 and it has worked fine forever, until today. I again suspect the hard drive sharing issue.

Anyone have any ideas on how to make these apps work again? I can't open Netscape 6, my current iMovie project, WMP, and a few other apps. Oh yeah, and now Internet Explorer doesn't work either. I think that any apps that have to open other files on my hard drive won't work because it says they don't have the privileges or something.

Interestingly enough, most of these apps work when I am logged in as root user.

Here are screenshots for your convenience.

Classic error message:
http://www.geocities.com/Augusta/6795/whattheheck2.jpg

iTunes error message:
http://www.geocities.com/Augusta/6795/whattheheck1.jpg

For some reason the links don't work, but just press enter in the address bar after you clicked the link and it will work. Or just copy and paste the URL. Weird.

Thanks a lot for your help.
 
Basically, you trashed the permissions structure of OS X. Quickest way to set things right is to do a reinstallation on top of your existing system (not a wipe-and-reinstall).
 
I just saw your location, and had to comment. Is A&M any better at supporting the Mac? I got my Mac my senior year, and CIS was pretty clueless. That and the fact that last I saw they had all-in-one G3s as their most modern Macs. Hope that's improved.

What are you trying to share? You could do it via FTP I suspect.
 
Did you try to set rwx access to all users ? It is not really secure, but it should free all access
 
How do I reinstall X on top of my current system? The best advice I have gotten about my problem is to "do a reinstallation on top of your existing system (not a wipe-and-reinstall)".

Can someone tell me how to do this, I assume I have to use my OS X system disk. I won't lose any of the stuff on my hard drive will I? I just want to reinstall the sytem, but leave everything else intact, like a OS 9 Clean Install. Thanks for your help.
 
Just boot up with the osx install cd, and install osx. Don't mess with DiskTool, and don't select "Clean install" or whatever it is that implies that it will wipe your drives first.

BTW, you can fix this prob, I just don't know how. However, if you ask "How to setuid to root" in the unix form, someone will know how.

I *think* its:
sudo chmod u+r /System/Library/CoreServices/Classic Startup.app/Contents/Resources/TruBlueEnvironment

But that could be wrong. Guess it wouldn't do any harm to try before you reinstall.
 
just to clarrify - 'clean install' will give you a whole new system while leaving your previous one intact and not wipe your drive. however i don't believe this is an option with osx. it is an os 9 feature.

is it even possible to have 2 versions of osx on the same drive/partition like it is in 9? my limited knowledge and intuition says this would cause some real confusion.
 
Yeah, I think kilowatt is close to the short way to do it. But you need to do both chown (to root) and chmod (to do the setuid).
It would be:
sudo chown root [path_to_TruBlueEnv]
sudo chmod 4755 [path_to_TruBlueEnv]

The "4" in the string of numbers after "chmod" does the setuid.
 
WAIT!!! There is one little thing you NEED to check before doing all of these suggestions. Last time I saw this error message, and all the other times that other people have, this solution below has worked, and I HIGHLY suggest you try it before messing with the Terminal or reinstalling (I hope I haven't come to you too late).

Let me first guess something... you are running the Classic environment from a second partition or second drive, right? Not from the same partition/drive as you installed OS X on. Good. :D (No, I'm not psychic.)

Now, find the partition/drive you are running the Classic environment from. Select it, and get info on it. Now click on the popup menu, and drag down to "Priveleges". Now look at the bottom of the info window -- there should be a box that says "Ignore privileges on this volume".

Can I venture to guess that this is checked in your case? If so, it is likely that this is causing the problem. Uncheck it, and now you should be able to start Classic.
 
Nope, sorry, only one hard drive on this machine. BTW it is not only Classic that doesn't work, it is almost all apps that have to read files off my hard drive. iTunes doesn't work, IE doesn't work, Netscape doesn't work, and many others don't work. It tells me I don't have the privileges, but I should be able to because I am logged in as my normal account, which until I did the sharing thing (read the first post), worked fine.

Thank you much.
 
I was about to do what genghiscohen told me, to set the setuid to root or something like that. I used his commands, but I got the following message in terminal:

sudo: /etc/sudoers is mode 0644, should be 0440

what does this mean, and how do I reset it?

I have attached a pic of my terminal window with this response in it. If I change it back to 0440 is it possible that my aforementioned problems would be fixed?

Thanks a lot.
 

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That means that the permissions for your sudoers file are also messed up. Sudoers is the list of users who are allowed to run the sudo command. From the root prompt that shows in your Terminal pic, type:
chmod 0440 /etc/sudoers
and the permissions will be corrected.
 
I did what you said and reset etc/sudoers to 0440, then I tried to set the privileges for TruBlueEnvironment, but I got another error message:

sudo: /etc/sudoers is owned by gid 80, should be 0

how can I fix this one? I went into NetInfo and changed the root gid from 80 to 0, but that didn't do anything. I am doing all this logged in as root user.

Thanks again for your help

I attached the terminal window pic of the message.
 

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