Comments on: The importance of permissions

By: linuxcrayon

linuxcrayon — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 22:25:45 +0000

I’m new too. Very new. But it sounds like one ugly mess (no offense). I would probably feel so intimidated by the task that I would just format everything and reinstall.

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 06:16:59 +0000

I think you’re right: That might also be a solution. I’m also kind of new to this.

On my end the problem is complicated by the fact that I have files scattered across that drive that were made by one or the other system (I probably should have mentioned that in my description). Just swapping the uid for one system makes another set of files inaccessible again.

I guess I could take a more aggressive approach, align the uid’s on both machines, then make a grand sweeping chown for everything in there, and that should fix it too. Thanks for that idea.

By: linuxcrayon

linuxcrayon — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 04:33:58 +0000

I forgot to mention how you could change the uid. It’s very easy. The command is the usermod command with the following syntax:

usermod -u [uid] [user name]

where ‘uid’ is the new uid and ‘user name’ is the name of the user you wish to alter. So in your case, it would be as simple as the following:

usermod -u 1000 kmandla

This seems to be a much easier method than what you described above. I don’t know if it would work properly or not (I’m still a Linux infant), but it’s an idea.

By: linuxcrayon

linuxcrayon — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 04:27:17 +0000

Wouldn’t that cause problems if you had multiple users on said network with files on different computers (for one reason or another) under the same account name? You wouldn’t want every user in the group “users” to have access to each other’s files…only to their own. So wouldn’t it be better to make the uid consistent?

I’m not sure if I’m explaining my thoughts well enough, but I hope you understand what I mean.