Why is fortune writing to the fortunes.dat file?

[Jeff Beadles]

In article <730 at dutrun.UUCP> hans at duttnph.UUCP (Hans Buurman) writes:
>
>It's more strange than that. We have sun3 and sun4 clients all running
>SunOS 4.0.1. All have /usr/games read-only. On the sun3's, this works fine.
>On sun4's, you get a message:
>/usr/games/lib/fortunes.dat: Read-only file system
>
>There are no other differences between the two fortunes.

This is due to the way that you have /usr/games mounted.  There are two
different styles of /etc/exports (on the server)that I know of.  They look like:

/usr2	host1 host2

or

/usr2	-rw=tango:packrat:pong:vanuatu:abacus


If you have the second, make sure that it's mounted rw, and not '-access='

If that does not work, look in /etc/fstab on the client.
(I don't have a sun, so I can't be overly specific here...)

The reason that fortune writes to the data file is to keep track of the
last fortune sent.  It's part of how it keeps spitting out random-looking
fortunes.

	Hope it helps,

		-Jeff
--
Jeff Beadles		Utek Sustaining Engineering, Tektronix Inc.
jeff at quark.WV.TEK.COM