how to set user permissions??

[oRGy]

Hi kids, sorry to bother you.

 

For some reason last week my primary user account (not root) went very odd, the K Menu vanished into the ether leaving only the logout and a couple of other options, the desktop lost some of the icons associated with .desktop things, konqueror refused to work some of the time, etc, so I logged in as root and created a newuser, and now I autologin into this.

 

So far so good...

 

Problem is, uh, I can't seem to access anything other than my /home/newuser directory. My old user account could at least access the other things.. I'd like this user to be able to view everything and have access to the entire /home dir.

 

But uh, I don't know how to do this - Userdrake seems to be useless, as I can't find anything to do with folder permissions, only some stuff about groups (anyone can tell me about that too, feel free).

 

Anyone?

 

Cheers.

 

PS - I observed odd hard disk thrashing for my newly created user account. On shutdown, I noticed that when the xinetd/saslauthd services (not sure which one might even be atd too) were shut down the thrashing instantly stopped. So I've turned off both services. Any negative impact for doing this? They didn't seem too crucial, though I may wish to run a web server from this machine at some stage in the future. Also, security is set to "High" in mandrake config.

[Guest Page 6]

Rather than changing all of the permissions on all of the directories, you can try this

 

 

[*]su to root, and run # cp /etc/group /etc/group-backup

 

[*]Rename the home directory of your original user. i.e., /home/olduser to /home/temp (or not, it's not strictly necessary, but you'll be deleting "olduser")

 

[*]su to root, and with a text editor, open the file /etc/group

 

[*] Inside the file, you'll see something like

olduser:x:104:

exim:x:110:terry

postfix:x:107:

postdrop:x:108:

firewire:x:111:

mysql:x:112:

newuser:x:113:

 

[*]change olduser:x:104: (note the user ID will most likely not be 104)

 

[*]Delete newuser:x:113:

 

[*]still as su/root, run: #chown -R newuser:newuser /home/temp

 

[*] run: #chown -R newuser:newuser /home/newuser

 

[*]You might want to run a # passwd newuser just to make sure everything is initialized properly.

 

[*]log newuser out, and then log back in again, and you should have access to everything that olduser had access to.

 

 

If you have problems, just reinsert your old /etc/group file (you're still using "newuser" - the system will keep track of whether that is 104 or 113)

[chris z]

i think your security may be set too high. at the setting you're at, users aren't going to be able to do a lot of things. unless you have some super secret project on your computer that you don't want anybody else to access, i'd start by lowering your security settings. also, if you go to userdrake, select a user & click "edit", you will see 2 columns. permissons that the user has & permissions you can add to that user. add all, or as many as you like. one other place to check user permissins is KUser, if you're using KDE as your desktop. that's in kicker button (bottom left)->configuration->other. you can set things in there, similar to userdrake. sometimes the KUser stuff overrides userdrake (i discovered that with a cdwriter permisson problem i had). setting things at those 2 places & lowering your security should give you all the freedom to navigate that you need. there will still be some things that only root will be allowed to do, but that's the nature of the beast.

Chris

[static]

What I would do is open a teminal console to get to the command line and type su to switch user to root. give your root passwd. cd /home.

chmod 775 /home/olduser's_dir_name

 

and "exit" to log out of root. That should be all you need to do. :)

 

Be sure to read the permissions section towards the end of this link for a slight grasp of permissions. It's pretty short and should tell you all you need to understand what my command above is doing.

 

8)

[Guest Page 6]

Well, yes, but he said he couldn't access what the olduser could, not just specifically the home directory --- modifying /etc/groups will automatically give him access to anything that olduser had (in essence, it will turn him into olduser, while keeping everything he has done as newuser). For example, if he had files in /var/www, or mp3s in a different directory, stuff in /opt or any other non-/home/olduser directory, just changing the permissions of his old home directory wouldn't help.

 

Actually, I forgot that any mentions of olduser in /etc/group should be changed to newuser with search and replace... that would put him automatically in any groups he had been in before.

 

technically, all he really has to do is add newuser to the olduser group to get access to most things:

 

olduser:x:104:newuser

 

but that only gives him access to what the groups have access to, not the owner.

 

Edit: Corrected typo

[oRGy]

thanks lads, got most stuff working though don't have write access to the old /home/olduser yet, but hopefully will soon...

 

any ideas on the xinetd/sasauthd stuff btw?