[K12OSN] overwrote user's home folder -permissions issue

Rob Owens hick518 at yahoo.com
Thu Jan 11 23:57:25 UTC 2007


Users and groups are actually kept track of by number.
 Each user and group has a number.  The names are only
to help us humans keep them all straight.

Anyway when you create a user, the number is assigned
automatically unless you specify it.  If you create
users in a different order on the new machine than on
the old machine, the user numbers won't match up.  

You probably now have a user "bob" whose home folder
is owned by "mary".  Or maybe bob's home folder is
owned by "502" or some other number (a number which
doesn't have an associated user on the new system).

"cat /etc/passwd" will show you the user and group
numbers, so you'll understand what I'm talking about.

If you want to fix bob's home directory permissions,
type this:

chown -R bob.bob /home/bob

This will assign owner "bob" and group "bob" to every
file and folder in /home/bob.  (First make sure that
the group "bob" exists and that's the group you really
want to assign).  Alternatively:

chown -R bob.students /home/bob would assign owner
"bob" and group "students" to every file and folder in
/home/bob.

-Rob
--- tkathan at charter.net wrote:

> Recently reinstalled server. Performed backup of
> home folders. I recreated a user, and then replaced
> their new home folder with the backup copy of their
> older home folder. 
> 
> Upon logging in, this error comes up "User's $HOME
> /.dmrc file is being ignored. This prevents the
> default session and language from being saved. File
> should be owned by user and have 644 permissions.
> User's $HOME directory must be owned by user and not
> writeable by other users."
> 
> I chmod that file to 644, logged back in, same
> thing. I tried to change some permissions as root on
> the user's home folder, but nothing I do seems to
> make this message go away. Also (as expected) all
> her desktop icons have the "unwriteable" ghostbuster
> sign on them.
> 
> Any help would greatly be appreciated. Thanks! 
> 
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> 



 
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