OK, this is interesting and my be related to forcing Bastille to run as dB4 instead of waiting until they patched it.

The problem is that I have a couple of boot errors and they have begun to make problems so I need to fix them. I am sure I am the cause of these error in that I removed a lot of default users and groups in the process of hardening the system.

First lets deal with the group 'adm'. I have tired "# groupadd adm" but it complains
groupadd: unable to open group file

So OK I tried to 'chmod 777' the file and I get an 'operation not permitted' error. The file is owned by root, the group is root, and I attempted the chmod as root.

I did undo the changes made by Bastille and that seams successful but that did not fix my problem.

So far google has not yielded any real help, but still looking.

Looking at the list of files in /etc in midnight commander with it showing all the file details it shows the permissions like this -rw-r--r-- the N1 column is 1 Owner=root Group=root

The same is true for many of the files and I am able to write to them, but not to group. The date on the file is Jan18, so I know that Bastille didn't make any changes to it. That date is about the time I deleted the accounts that were supposedly not needed.

I am using tty1 and logged in as root, not as a sudo/su root.

I am at a loss as to how to correct this problem. Google is still not helping. Most of what I am finding on google involve php and scripts or permissions on the file system devices and a normal user not root.

Can some one shed some light on this?

Thanks in advance

I guess the file you're trying to edit has the immutable bit set.
Read the man pages for chattr and lsattr to see how you can change it and edit the file.

Regards

Thanks

That did the trick.