[CoLoCo] permission question
Neal McBurnett
neal at bcn.boulder.co.us
Sat Mar 29 19:16:32 GMT 2008
On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 11:28:31AM -0600, Jim Hutchinson wrote:
> They say a little knowledge is dangerous. I think I'm finding out
> how true that is. I was logged in as one kid trying to open a file
Yes indeed - it is dangerous to play around with recursive
file-modifying programs without knowing what they are doing or what
actually needs to be done....
> in the others home directory. It wasn't working and in my experience
> you can usually open files in others /home. That seems to be the
What application are you dealing with?
I'd think offhand that you might want to try other options for
"sharing" files. Sharing files between users on a single machine can
be complicated when you don't know exactly how the application in
question works. It often does work easily for simpler applications,
but can certainly be difficult to do securely and easily and robustly
for other applications.
This might lead you down the good old "samba" file sharing path,
which will be of much more utility as things improve over time, so
that can be useful.
> default in ubuntu. However, for whatever reason it wasn't working so
> I tried to "fix" it by chmod-ing to 655 (I thought this was the
> default perms for /home) but it didn't help so I bumped it up to
> 777. It still didn't work and I don't know why.
>
> However, the permission changes f-ed up the users account as now it
> won't log in. I get this error...
Good backups are critical when doing such experiments, as is good
testing before you go much further.
I'd be leery of attempts to "fix" what you've got now, given the
number of random changes you've made. Asking the system to go back to
"default" permissions is not possible since you may well have changed
the defaults along the way, and some changes may depend on others.
Thus the importance of backups.
It might be possible and helpful (and nice) to have some rescue
scripts to set "standard" permissions on well-known, critical
directories and files like .ssh, .dmrc, etc. But they wouldn't help
you now given all the changes you've made.
Neal McBurnett http://mcburnett.org/neal/
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