restoring FC1 to *new* partition from tar archive

Jeff Vian jvian10 at charter.net
Mon May 10 02:25:49 UTC 2004



Luciano Miguel Ferreira Rocha wrote:

>On Sun, May 09, 2004 at 08:21:43AM -0500, Jeff Vian wrote:
>  
>
>>I think you are confusing /restore/ with /use/.  
>>It can be /restored/ using any system. The ownership is numeric and does 
>>not change on a differnent system.
>>    
>>
>
>No, I'm not confusing it, and no, the ownership isn't numeric. At least,
>in my experience. I've created backups of redhat and fedora installs, in
>single user mode, and restore them under live cds (knoppix or self-made).
>If I didn't use the option I described, some files would end with
>different numeric ids than they should. In particular, the knoppix cd has
>different values for cups and other system accounts, and when restoring
>the files would use those values.
>  
>
Ownership is stored on the system as numeris and is part of the inode data..
When displayed by ls or similar utilities it uses the values in the 
passwd and group files to provide names for the user to see in the 
listing. The chown command also translates the text user name to his UID 
befroe assigining it to the file.  The find command has an option to 
search for files with the numeric UID or name.

To check this you can simply do a chown on a file and assign it a 
numeric owner and group id  that has no matching user/group  id in the 
passwd file. then do an ls -l on that file and you will see the owner 
and group listed with the  /numeric/ userid and group you assigned. In 
the example below I did just the opposite:  I took an existing user 
account and changed his numeric UID in /etc/passwd.

The assigned numeric userid for a file restore from a tar file does not 
change,  However, the displayed (and effective) owner may change if 
there is a user on the system with the same uid and a different user name.

I also have tested this when removing user accounts, without removing 
the home directory.  The owner column in the display from the ls -l 
output becomes numeric as soon as the matching user entry in passwd is 
removed.

Below is an example.

----------This was done with the userid in /etc/passwd-----------------

# ls -al
total 40
drwx------    3 dennis   dennis       4096 Dec  5  2002 .
drwxr-xr-x   11 root     root         4096 Feb 24 17:15 ..
-rw-r--r--    1 dennis   dennis         24 Dec  5  2002 .bash_logout
-rw-r--r--    1 dennis   dennis        191 Dec  5  2002 .bash_profile
-rw-r--r--    1 dennis   dennis        124 Dec  5  2002 .bashrc
-rw-r--r--    1 dennis   dennis       5531 Dec  5  2002 .canna
-rw-r--r--    1 dennis   dennis        854 Dec  5  2002 .emacs
-rw-r--r--    1 dennis   dennis        120 Dec  5  2002 .gtkrc
drwxr-xr-x    3 dennis   dennis       4096 Dec  5  2002 .kde

----------this is what is displayed after I changed the numerid UID for 
this user in passwd ----------
Note, there is now no user with UID of 501, and no changes were made 
except in passwd..

# ls -al
total 40
drwx------    3 501      dennis       4096 Dec  5  2002 .
drwxr-xr-x   11 root     root         4096 Feb 24 17:15 ..
-rw-r--r--    1 501      dennis         24 Dec  5  2002 .bash_logout
-rw-r--r--    1 501      dennis        191 Dec  5  2002 .bash_profile
-rw-r--r--    1 501      dennis        124 Dec  5  2002 .bashrc
-rw-r--r--    1 501      dennis       5531 Dec  5  2002 .canna
-rw-r--r--    1 501      dennis        854 Dec  5  2002 .emacs
-rw-r--r--    1 501      dennis        120 Dec  5  2002 .gtkrc
drwxr-xr-x    3 501      dennis       4096 Dec  5  2002 .kde


>When booting the restored system, those files would have invalid
>owners/group.
>  
>
The invalid owner/group is a result of the mismatch between the UID and 
GID on the originating system and on the destination system.

>  
>
>>The user ids are a problem if /used/ on a system where the group and 
>>passwd files define different userids for the owners.
>>    
>>
>
>Not as such. As tar uncompresses using user and group names (in _my_
>experience), the extracted files will be usable by the users on that
>system.
>  
>
tar writes the raw data. It does not have any idea of the names 
associated with the numeric UID on the file.
The link between the numeric values on the file and the names they are 
associated with is provided by the system and use of /etc/group and 
/etc/passwd.

>Of course, if you consider the "use" of such backup as above, then it
>still is a problem.
>
>Regards,
>Luciano Rocha
>
>  
>
I had to get this straight definitively when I merged user accounts from 
2 different ISPs that had many overlapping UID and GID numbers, with the 
names mismatched between the sites.  It took a lot of planning and 
creation of custom perl scripts to merge the accounts..

>  
>





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