Who's messing with the permissions?

The permissions on my /var/log/messages file keep getting reset to "-rw-r-----" (so that ordinary users can't read it) even though I've set the PERMISSION_SECURITY variable in /etc/sysconfig (via Yast2) to "here local" and included the line /var/log/messages root.root 744 in /etc/permissions.here. (/etc/permissions.local has no uncommented lines.) So what program is changing the permissions on me? And when more than one permissions file is specified in PERMISSION_SECURITY, how do the different files interact? The comments in /etc/permissions don't help with this. Paul Abrahams