Administrator lacking super-user privileges on cygwin installation

[Larry Hall]

Myk Melez wrote:

> I have two machines with what look like identical cygwin installations 
> on them, but the Administrator account on one of them doesn't have 
> super-user privileges.  This causes sshd not to have access to 
> /home/some-user/.ssh (which is restricted to only "some-user") and thus 
> prevents key-based authentication.  Regular password-based 
> authentication works, so the problem isn't sshd itself.  Logging in as 
> the Administrator and doing "ls /home/some-user/.ssh/*" gives me a 
> "permission denied" error, which also confirms that the problem is with 
> the permissions of the Administrator account and not sshd.
> 
> The Administrator NT accounts (and Administrators NT groups) seem 
> identical on the two machines, as are permissions for the C:\cygwin 
> directory.  Both systems had old cygwin installations on them that we 
> blew away before installing the latest.  What am I missing?


1. SYSTEM is the account that sshd runs as, not administrator.  It's
    the only default account that has permissions to switch user contexts
    without authenticating the new user through Windows password mechanism
    (for NT/W2K/XP).

2. Only the owner of the private key files in .ssh should have permissions
    to access these files.  Public key files should be readable by anyone.
    You'll want to check the permissions on these files relative to the
    above.

3. Generally, you should read <http://cygwin.com/problems.html>.



-- 
Larry Hall                              http://www.rfk.com
RFK Partners, Inc.                      (508) 893-9779 - RFK Office
838 Washington Street                   (508) 893-9889 - FAX
Holliston, MA 01746


--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/