Hi, Can anyone cast any light on the following please ? I have been using ppp on this 7.0 system since last November without changing any permissions in /dev or /sbin/pppd. I just used YAST to setup the modem to be accessed by my user name. Over the past couple of days it is fair to say that I have done some heavy updating - changing to xfree86 4.1 and installing the new vanilla kernel 2.4.8. So far as I know, however, I have not touched anything that affects the modem or ppp - and the kernel upgrade was just the latest in a long line. After I had finished the kernel work this morning I was able to log on to my ISP as usual - no problems (using wvdial as always). I then reinstalled vmware and alsa (as I have on at least 8 previous occasions). I tried to log to the ISP again shortly afterwards (there was no intermediate reboot), and got "permission denied" when I tried to access /dev/modem. /dev/modem is, of course, just a link to /dev/ttyS0. After much fiddling around I found that the only way to cure the permission problem was to change the permissions on /dev/ttyS0 to make it world-writeable. After that I got access to the modem, but ppp immediately died with the message "must be root to run /usr/sbin/pppd, since it is not setuid-root". So I set pppd suid-root and now I can connect as before. As I said, I have *never* previously modified /dev/ttyS0 or /usr/sbin/pppd. I even tried going back to my backup kernel 2.4.7, but it made no difference. Have I accidentally activated some security script ? Any thoughts will be gratefully received. Regards, Geoff _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com