The device-mapper multipath packages provide tools to manage multipath devices by issuing instructions to the device-mapper multipath kernel module, and by managing the creation and removal of partitions for device-mapper devices. It was discovered that the multipathd daemon set incorrect permissions on the socket used to communicate with command line clients. An unprivileged, local user could use this flaw to send commands to multipathd, resulting in access disruptions to storage devices accessible via multiple paths and, possibly, file system corruption on these devices. Users of device-mapper-multipath are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain a backported patch to resolve this issue. The multipathd service must be restarted for the changes to take effect. Important: the version of the multipathd daemon in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 has a known issue which may cause a machine to become unresponsive when the multipathd service is stopped. This issue is tracked in the Bugzilla bug #494582; a link is provided in the References section of this erratum. Until this issue is resolved, we recommend restarting the multipathd service by issuing the following commands in sequence: # killall -KILL multipathd # service multipathd restart