amandas group membership in FC6?

[David G. Miller]

Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Saturday 25 November 2006 11:05, David G. Miller wrote:
>   
>> Gene Heskett <gene.heskett at verizon.net> wrote:
>>     
>>> Greetings;
>>>
>>> Despite the fact that the user 'amanda' is a member of the group
>>> 'disk', all compilations and new files generated by the user amanda
>>> seem to be owned by amanda:amanda instead of the expected amanda:disk.
>>>
>>> The end result is that many of my backup operations are failing
>>> because the amanda utility doesn't have perms to delete or write to
>>> files actually owned by amanda:disk.
>>>
>>> I just went thru all the directory trees amanda needs to access and
>>> chowned everything back the way its supposed to be, but then I built
>>> the 20061124 tarball just now, and everything is still owned by
>>>
>>> amanda:amanda.
>>>
>>> >From my  /etc/group file:
>>>
>>> disk:x:6:root,amanda
>>>
>>> So I blew it away, called up KUsr and verified that amanda was indeed
>>> a member of the group disk.  Even deleted the user and re-added it and
>>> made sure this new copy of amanda was a member of the group disk.
>>>
>>> Then as "amanda", I unpacked it again and rebuilt it, but I still have
>>> the
>>> same problem.  Because none of the files are owned by amanda:disk, the
>>> end result is several megs of dead, can't do a thing code that I'd
>>> just as well not bother with the 'make install'.
>>>
>>> Anything that amanda has touched over the last 4 days since I started
>>> running it again has been converted to being owned by amanda:amanda,
>>> and if the file existed, and was to be deleted as part of the
>>> housekeeping, was not because the old file was owned by amanda:disk. 
>>> So my backups are being slowly trashed because the indice files are
>>> not updatable.
>>>
>>> Whats the deal with FC6 and its owner:group handling?  Am I setting up
>>> the
>>> user wrong or what?
>>>       
>> You probably had the default of "Create private group for user" still
>> checked when you created the user.  When that's checked, the user gets
>> created and the default group for the user is set to a new group with
>> the same name as the user.  You should still be able to change the
>> default group to "disk" for your amanda user.  I run Gnome so I can't
>> help you with the details.
>>     
>
> Useing kde-3.5.5, I didn't notice that option in the tools supplied. There 
> was Kusr, and something called user manager.  But the first time I just 
> ran 'adduser amanda'.
>   
See Anne's recent post and correction.  system-config-users lets you 
manipulate group membership, etc.
>   
>> Dumb question: why didn't you just do a "yum install amanda
>> amanda-client"?  It's much easier than building amanda and manually
>> setting up the user, etc.
>>     
>
> 2 reasons,
> 1) whats in the repos is often a year or more out of date, and due to the 
> restrictions of the rpm packaging system usually has permission problems 
> that can only be sorted correctly by nuking the rpm and following the 
> build instructions to install the tarball.  This is the first time I've 
> had problems installing a tarball in 6 years!
>
> 2) I'm one of the canaries in this particular coal mine, I make and 
> install the new snapshots as often as Jean-Louis releases them, so if 
> there are any gotcha's I can report back the next day on their lists.
> Thats one of my contributions to your having the worlds best backup 
> software.
>   
I like my backup software to be VERY stable so I'll put up with whatever 
Fedora decides is sufficiently stable to include in their distro.

With regard to this problem:
> [amanda at coyote GenesAmandaHelper-0.5]$ ls -l /mnt/hdb/home
> total 36
> drwxr-xr-x 21     33 disk   4096 Nov  8 23:37 amanda
> drwx------  3 amanda amanda 4096 Nov  9  2004 elladene
> drwx------ 14    502    502 4096 Nov 12  2002 elmer
> drwx------ 36 gene   gene   4096 Nov  9 16:32 gene
> drwx------  2 root   root   4096 Oct 22  2002 lost+found
> drwx------  3    503    503 4096 Nov 21  2002 roadrunner
> drwxr-xr-x 18 gene   gene   4096 Aug 14 03:42 shop
> drwxr-xr-x 19   1000   1000 4096 Aug 13  2004 shop-gene
> drwxr-xr-x  6   1002   1002 4096 Dec 14  2005 spamd
find provides a mechanism for finding all of the files with a particular 
UID or GID and then doing whatever you'd like with them.  Something 
along the lines of:

find / -uid 33 -exec chown amanda:disk {} \; -print

The predicate -gid can be used with numeric group IDs.  If you want to 
confirm the changes, use -ok instead of -exec.

Cheers,
Dave

-- 
Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
-- Ambrose Bierce