Encrypted home partition accessible by administrator

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2019 at 06:00:00AM +1000, Karl Auer wrote:
> On Tue, 2019-04-23 at 02:13 +0800, Bret Busby wrote:
> > The operating system was UNIX System V. I think it was SCO UNIX
> > System V. It was somewhere in the late 1980's to early 1990's.
> 
> I've used more Unixen than I can remember and I don't recall ANY
> version of chmod that could be run without a modespec.
> 
> That said, just 'cos I don't remember it doesn't mean it wasn't so :-)

I mean, maybe, but even something as old as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_7_Unix didn't have that particular
defect (see
https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V7-Snapshot-Development/usr/src/cmd/chmod.c#L31-L34).
V7 wasn't the same as its later descendant System V, but it seems hard
to imagine why the System V developers would have *removed* that
particular check.

Bret may of course just be misremembering some detail here, since it was
a long time ago.  And it's quite possible that their sysadmin could have
recovered the situation but simply didn't know how.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]