dosemu: /var/lock permissions

[Cheryl Homiak]

I received a letter from the debian maintainer of dosemu telling me to check the
permissions of /var/lock. When i did this with ls -l i got "total 0. When I
checked /var I got permissions indicating that only root could write to
/var/lock. However, I can't seem to change the permissions no matter what I do;
even changing that partition's entry in /etc/fstab doesn't do it. there are
other directories in /var that are writable by everybody. My /var is on a
separate partition, courteousy of the partitioning howto. I am concerned because
I compared this with a machine I am working on for somebody else where /var is
part of the root partition; /var/loc is writable by everybody there and the
number given after the permissions is "3" where the one given in my setup is '5"
(I'm afraid I haven't figured out what this means.
Do I need to mount /var differently in fstab? I tried changing the fstab entry
from "defaults" to "rw" and then to "rw,suid" to no avail.
TIA.