sshd "owned by root" error

["Ordal, Peter" <peter dot ordal at rochester dot edu>]

I just finished an install of Cygwin's OpenSSH on XP SP 2. Along the way I
got the error:

/var/empty must be owned by root and not group or world-writable.

This has been discussed several places before, I know. Still, I had a
different experience than previous posts. I found that what "owned by root"
meant was actually owned by the account running sshd. So, when I ran
/usr/sbin/sshd -D under my domain account, I had to chown /var/empty to my
account.

I tried to get sshd to run as a service under the system account, but it
wouldn't start. The console error message (on typing net start sshd) was not
helpful, and the event log just said "starting service `sshd' failed: execv:
255, error 255." Even with /var/empty chowned to system, no luck. So I was
forced to change the sshd service to run as my domain account, and to
similarly take ownership of /var/empty.

I found this error message originates on line 1166 of sshd.c in the openssh
package. Perhaps it should be changed. Saying "owned by root" doesn't make
much sense here.

Cheers,
Peter

References:
Google search -
http://www.google.com/search?q=cygwin+%22must+be+owned+by+root+and+not+group
%22
Best results from that:
1 - http://archive.erdelynet.com/ssh-l/2003-09/msg00048.php
2 - http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~sudhakar/linux/trivia.html
3 - http://www.derkeiler.com/Newsgroups/comp.security.ssh/2003-05/0219.html
(rather spirited)

>From this list - http://sourceware.org/ml/cygwin/2005-03/msg00514.html

--
Peter Ordal
Webmaster
Office of College Enrollment
University of Rochester

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