Permission problems after install of F16 comming from F14.

Erik P. Olsen epodata at gmail.com
Thu Jun 7 18:27:22 UTC 2012


On 07/06/12 18:09, Joachim Backes wrote:
> On 06/07/2012 04:35 PM, Ed Greshko wrote:
>> On 06/07/2012 08:20 PM, Erik P. Olsen wrote:
>>> On 07/06/12 01:27, Ed Greshko wrote:
>>>> On 06/07/2012 05:26 AM, Erik P. Olsen wrote:
>>>>> I have a number of F14 partitions which must be mounted unchanged on the new F16
>>>>> system. It turns out that I get unexpected permission problems with this approach.
>>>>> I use the same user name on both systems but on F14 I got userID 500 whereas on F16
>>>>> it became 1000. I wasn't aware of that but learned it the hard way. When I chowned
>>>>> the permissions to 1000:1000 it worked on F16 but now not on F14.
>>>>>
>>>>> What is the proper way to fix this problem? I am tempted to reinstall F16 and force
>>>>> my userID to 500, but the system warns me not to create userIDs<   1000. It is not
>>>>> feasible to clone the partitions due to space constrains so I am not able to have
>>>>> identical partitions with different permissions.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> The "proper" way to fix this is to do it on the F14 system.
>>>>
>>>> Change your password entry to have uid:gid of 1000:1000.  Make the change to the
>>>> group file to change it to 1000 as well.
>>>>
>>>> Then, go to all the top of all partitions/directories owned by 500 and chown -R
>>>> 1000:1000.  In other words, make all the changes on the F14 side.
>>>>
>>>> I had to go through this process when I installed F16 since my RHELv4 system had me
>>>> as 500:500 and I NFS mount my directories from there.  Just took 5 or so minutes.
>>>>
>>>> Reinstalls are never needed to change a user's gid/uid.
>>>>
>>> I thought of this at the very beginning but I never found out how to change userID
>>> from 500 to 1000. Please explain how to do that.
>>>
>>
>> OK....  Let's say that your user name on the F14 system is olsen.....
>>
>> The entry in /etc/passwd is probably
>>
>> olsen:x:500:500:Erik olsen:/home/olsen:/bin/bash
>>
>> and /etc/group is probably
>>
>> olsen:x:500:
>>
>> Just change those to...
>>
>> olsen:x:1000:1000:Erik olsen:/home/olsen:/bin/bash
>> and
>> olsen:x:1000:
>>
>
> Why not use the commands "usermod" and "groupmod"? According to the
> usermod man page, usermod will modify the ownership of almost all user's
> files (but not of the files outside of the user's home dir).
>
>> And then....
>>
>> chown -R 1000:1000 /home/olsen
>>
>> along with any other directories or file systems that were previously owned by uid
>> 500 gid 500.
>>
>> That's all...

Oh, this is much more than I anticipated when I planned to move from F14 to F16. 
And it is not just my userID it is also all the other userIDs on the system. 
/home/someone is not the biggest problem but there are lots of directories/files 
all over that have to inspected. I wish there were conditional chown so that it 
would only change userID to 1000 if it was exactly 500.

Sigh.

-- 
Erik


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