Hi all, I've been battling with a problem accessing an external device via serial port. I have it working now, but am not entirely satisfied with the 'solution' (c.f thread "/dev/ttyS0 and /dev/ttys0 - What's the difference?") The device attaches to /dev/ttyS1, which is root:uucp:rw-rw---- so I figured a standard user would be able to access the device without problem since by default they are assigned membership of group uucp. I found that this was not the case. After much faffing, I have identified the cause as NIS. With the default setup for the min GUID as 500, the output from groups on the server is: root@gandalf:~> groups dylan dylan : dandg users dialout video uucp audio root@gandalf:~> groups fabrizio fabrizio : users dialout video uucp audio (dandg is a group I have created for controlling network shared file access GUID=500, it is the default group for the relevant users so their files are created with group dandg) on a client I get: dylan@gandalf:~> groups dandg dylan@gandalf:~> groups fabrizio users This is clearly not satisfactory. From the point of view of accessing the serial port, I could set it to rw-rw-rw, but would need to do so on every machine which the external device might be used on. Also, that isn't actually the problem. What I actually want (and indeed, expected to be the case) is that the full group membership be distributed by NIS. To this end, I have temporarily set the min GUID on the NIS maps to be 0. This has done the trick - normal users can now access the serial port - but still doesn't seem satisfactory as I notice that the groups below GUID 500 appear twice when system and NIS groups are listed in YaST. Is there a better way to accomplish my goal? Should I delete the local entries from /etc/groups (surely not since there would be no groups defined either before ypbind starts or if the NIS server is unavailable)? Thanks for any help, comments, hints... Dylan -- Sweet moderation Heart of this nation Desert us not We are between the wars - Billy Bragg