[Xastir] Mac OS X + USB Serial

[Curt, WE7U]

On Tue, 7 Sep 2004, Michael Virgilio wrote:

> Well, permissions are a good start... And minicom was running as root...
> but Xastir still locks up when running as root also.

#1 Rule:  Don't run Xastir as root.  You can run it SUID root by
setting the permissions on the executable to 4755, but don't log in
as root and run Xastir.  Log in as a normal user in all cases.  If
you set Xastir SUID root, it will drop root priviledges most of the
time, and only regain them when it absolutely needs to in order to
access ports/interfaces.  It's a security thing.

If you run Xastir as root, all security work we did in Xastir is
mostly moot:  If someone does an appropriate string overflow in
Xastir by sending it carefully constructed packets, they could
conceivably gain root access and cause damage or take over your
system.  Again, don't run Xastir as root.


> The port by default is set crw-rw-rw-, o: root, g: wheel, most likely
> because any user under MacOS could need access to the serial port.
> Remember that it's a consumer-oriented OS...

So your permissions are fine for normal user access.


> It seemed like I had some luck, somehow, for a bit. It seemed to be able
> to open the port and send commands, but wasn't receiving anything back.
> But this disappeared after a reboot and I'm back to the original state of
> locking up on port open again. I set debug level to 2, and it locks right
> after the port open line, before anything was even sent to it.

Check the state of the handshaking lines when you open it with
Minicom and with Xastir.  If there's a difference, you should be
able to duplicate that difference with the "stty" function.  At the
moment I'm thinking that your problem may be with handshaking.  If
it were me, I'd throw on an LED breakout box and see what the
differences were between the good and bad setups.  An LED and
resistor can do the same thing, only slower.  A DMM could also give
you the answers here.

--
Curt, WE7U			         http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
"Lotto:    A tax on people who are bad at math." -- unknown
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