Q: I'm running uucico and all I get is "bus error"--no other messages, even with debugging turned on to any level.  What might be wrong?

A: Ensure that the uucico program can access the UUCP spool directory.  Since the program is (supposed to be) SetUID uucp and SetGID daemon, this means the uucp user must be able to read and write the directory.

If you examine the files using the UNIX ls(1) command, you should see the following (dates might be different, and the size of the spool directory might be different):

localhost [/me]-7% ls -ldg /usr/lib/uucp/uucico /usr/spool/uucp
---s--s--x  1 uucp     daemon     90112 Nov 11 17:25 /usr/lib/uucp/uucico*
drwxr-xr-x 14 uucp     daemon      1024 Dec 22 03:30 /usr/spool/uucp/

If you see different results, and you're not absolutely certain why they're different, you can set things right with the following commands:

localhost [/me]-7% su
localhost-1# chown uucp.daemon /usr/lib/uucp/uucico /usr/spool/uucp
localhost-2# chmod 755 /usr/spool/uucp
localhost-3# chmod 6111 /usr/lib/uucp/uucico

One other thing to note: the output of the ls on uucico is the same whether the owner and the group have execute permission or not.  In UNIX parlance, the mode display in the ls is the same whether the numeric mode is 6001, 6011, or 6111.  Be sure it's 6111: SetUID, SetGID, and execute for user, group, and other.

By the way, the rest of the commands in the UUCP suite are likely subject to the same limitations. We have verified that uucp behaves like uucico in this situation; we have not tested the rest of the suite, but anything which needs access to the spool directory are suspect.  For completeness, here's another ls -lg:

localhost [/me]-8% ls -lg /usr/bin/uu* /usr/lib/uucp/uu*
---s--s--x  1 uucp     daemon     24576 Nov 11 17:25 /usr/bin/uucp*
-rwxr-xr-x  1 uucp     daemon     16384 Nov 11 17:26 /usr/bin/uudecode*
-rwxr-xr-x  1 uucp     daemon      2984 Nov 11 17:26 /usr/bin/uuencode*
---s--s--x  1 uucp     daemon      4620 Nov 11 17:25 /usr/bin/uulog*
---s--s--x  1 uucp     daemon      5776 Nov 11 17:25 /usr/bin/uuname*
---s--s--x  1 uucp     daemon     24576 Nov 11 17:26 /usr/bin/uupoll*
---s--s--x  1 uucp     daemon      8716 Nov 11 17:26 /usr/bin/uuq*
---s--s--x  2 uucp     daemon      3548 Nov 11 17:26 /usr/bin/uusend*
---s--s--x  1 uucp     daemon      4260 Nov 11 17:26 /usr/bin/uusnap*
---s--s--x  1 uucp     daemon     24576 Nov 11 17:25 /usr/bin/uux*
---s--s--x  1 uucp     daemon     90112 Nov 11 17:25 /usr/lib/uucp/uucico*
---s--s--x  1 uucp     daemon     11136 Nov 11 17:25 /usr/lib/uucp/uuclean*
---s--s---  1 uucp     daemon     32768 Nov 11 17:26 /usr/lib/uucp/uuxqt*

QA689

Valid for 1.0, 2.0, 3.0,3.1