(Brain-fade well and truly set in!!)

Whilst Victoria endures CoViD-19 Lock-down number five or six, I thought
I'd spend the week-end backing up my 500GB internal hard drive to a 2TB
external hard-drive then blow away the 'old' OS's (MDA 9, MGA 3 & 4) and
then install MGA8 into one of those freed up partitions.

And I have my 'Home' directory on a separate partition.

When I do that installation, I think I'll need to tell it something
about my 'Home' partition ..... something which I think used to be set
to '500:500' but, because of the greater number of processes (or
something) that may be running, when I installed MGA 6, the advice was
that that value should be increased to 1000:1000 or even 1500:1500.

I think I set it to 1000:1000 but would like to check before I try
installing MGA 8, so could some kind soul please tell me what this Magic
setting is called so that I can check what value I've set it to so that
MGA8 will find it??

Thank you. ;-)
--
Daniel

On Wed, 01 Sep 2021 23:54:53 -0400, Daniel65 <daniel47@eternal-september.org> wrote:
> I think I set it to 1000:1000 but would like to check before I try
> installing MGA 8, so could some kind soul please tell me what this Magic
> setting is called so that I can check what value I've set it to so that
> MGA8 will find it??

It's the uid number set when creating the user. It's stored in /etc/passwd in
the third field for that user.

See "man 5 passwd". The command "id" will show the settings currently in use, if
you're logged in, and want to keep the same on a new install.

Regards, Dave Hodgins

--
Change dwhodgins@nomail.afraid.org to davidwhodgins@teksavvy.com for
email replies.

David W. Hodgins wrote on 2/9/21 2:03 pm:
> On Wed, 01 Sep 2021 23:54:53 -0400, Daniel65
> <daniel47@eternal-september.org> wrote:
>> I think I set it to 1000:1000 but would like to check before I try
>> installing MGA 8, so could some kind soul please tell me what this Magic
>> setting is called so that I can check what value I've set it to so that
>> MGA8 will find it??
>
> It's the uid number set when creating the user. It's stored in
> /etc/passwd in
> the third field for that user.
>
> See "man 5 passwd". The command "id" will show the settings currently in
> use, if
> you're logged in, and want to keep the same on a new install.
>
> Regards, Dave Hodgins
>
Ah!! Great. That's the one, thanks David.

And, what do you know .... it is set to 1000:1000 so I guess my memory
is not a bad as I thought it was!! ;p-P

Now .... for question 2!!
--
Daniel

On 2/9/21 1:54 pm, Daniel65 wrote:

>
> And I have my 'Home' directory on a separate partition.
>
> When I do that installation, I think I'll need to tell it something
> about my 'Home' partition ..... something which I think used to be set
> to '500:500' but, because of the greater number of processes (or

Not sure if I am on the right track but if you assign the mount point
of your home partition to "/home" during your partition set up. It
should all be taken care of.

--
faeychild
Running plasmashell 5.20.4 on 5.10.60-desktop-2.mga8 kernel.
Mageia release 8 (Official) for x86_64 installed via Mageia-8-x86_64-DVD.iso

On Thu, 2 Sep 2021 13:54:53 +1000, Daniel65 wrote:
> (Brain-fade well and truly set in!!)
>
> Whilst Victoria endures CoViD-19 Lock-down number five or six, I thought
> I'd spend the week-end backing up my 500GB internal hard drive to a 2TB
> external hard-drive then blow away the 'old' OS's (MDA 9, MGA 3 & 4) and
> then install MGA8 into one of those freed up partitions.
>
> And I have my 'Home' directory on a separate partition.
>
> When I do that installation, I think I'll need to tell it something
> about my 'Home' partition ..... something which I think used to be set
> to '500:500' but, because of the greater number of processes (or
> something) that may be running, when I installed MGA 6, the advice was
> that that value should be increased to 1000:1000 or even 1500:1500.

Yup 499 was top end for processes and 500 was free for users.
Then cam systemd and new limits are 999 and below are for system and
1000 and up are for user IDs.

> I think I set it to 1000:1000 but would like to check before I try
> installing MGA 8, so could some kind soul please tell me what this Magic
> setting is called so that I can check what value I've set it to so that
> MGA8 will find it??

Items of interest are UID (User id) and GID (Group id).
For example:

$ ls -n /home
total 32
drwx------ 12 1500 1500 4096 Sep 1 17:19 bittwister
drwx------ 14 1506 1506 4096 Apr 15 14:47 chris
drwx------ 15 1004 1004 4096 Feb 9 2021 gnome
drwx------ 22 1001 1001 4096 May 22 05:54 junk
drwx------ 21 1002 1002 4096 May 26 17:01 kde
drwx------ 16 1000 1000 4096 Feb 9 2021 normal
drwx------ 15 1003 1003 4096 Feb 9 2021 xfce
^^^ ^^^^
Note UID GID columns
$ grep $USER: /etc/passwd
bittwister:x:1500:1500:Bit Twister:/home/bittwister:/bin/bash
^^^ ^^^^
Note UID GID columns

On Thu, 02 Sep 2021 04:21:42 -0400, Daniel65 <daniel47@eternal-september.org> wrote:

> David W. Hodgins wrote on 2/9/21 2:03 pm:
>> On Wed, 01 Sep 2021 23:54:53 -0400, Daniel65
>> <daniel47@eternal-september.org> wrote:
>>> I think I set it to 1000:1000 but would like to check before I try
>>> installing MGA 8, so could some kind soul please tell me what this Magic
>>> setting is called so that I can check what value I've set it to so that
>>> MGA8 will find it??
>>
>> It's the uid number set when creating the user. It's stored in
>> /etc/passwd in
>> the third field for that user.
>>
>> See "man 5 passwd". The command "id" will show the settings currently in
>> use, if
>> you're logged in, and want to keep the same on a new install.
>>
>> Regards, Dave Hodgins
>>
> Ah!! Great. That's the one, thanks David.
>
> And, what do you know .... it is set to 1000:1000 so I guess my memory
> is not a bad as I thought it was!! ;p-P
>
> Now .... for question 2!!

I should have added, the number after the colon is the gid (group id). You can
use ls -ln to see the numeric uid:gid for a given directory/file.

Regards, Dave Hodgins

--
Change dwhodgins@nomail.afraid.org to davidwhodgins@teksavvy.com for
email replies.

David W. Hodgins wrote on 3/9/21 4:33 am:
> On Thu, 02 Sep 2021 04:21:42 -0400, Daniel65
> <daniel47@eternal-september.org> wrote:
>> David W. Hodgins wrote on 2/9/21 2:03 pm:
>>> On Wed, 01 Sep 2021 23:54:53 -0400, Daniel65
>>> <daniel47@eternal-september.org> wrote:
>>>> I think I set it to 1000:1000 but would like to check before I
>>>> try installing MGA 8, so could some kind soul please tell me
>>>> what this Magic setting is called so that I can check what
>>>> value I've set it to so that MGA8 will find it??
>>>
>>> It's the uid number set when creating the user. It's stored in
>>> /etc/passwd in the third field for that user.
>>>
>>> See "man 5 passwd". The command "id" will show the settings
>>> currently in use, if you're logged in, and want to keep the same
>>> on a new install.
>>>
>>> Regards, Dave Hodgins
>>>
>> Ah!! Great. That's the one, thanks David.
>>
>> And, what do you know .... it is set to 1000:1000 so I guess my
>> memory is not a bad as I thought it was!! ;p-P
>>
>> Now .... for question 2!!
>
> I should have added, the number after the colon is the gid (group
> id). You can use ls -ln to see the numeric uid:gid for a given
> directory/file.
>
> Regards, Dave Hodgins
>
Thank you, David

Hmm!! Entering 'ls -ln' as user gives me 'total 96', nine files and
eleven directories .... including one (non-used) directory who's uid:gid
shows as '0:0'.

I wonder if that's why I cannot delete it!! ;-)
--
Daniel

On 04.09.2021 at 20:17, Daniel65 scribbled:

> David W. Hodgins wrote on 3/9/21 4:33 am:
>
> > I should have added, the number after the colon is the gid (group
> > id). You can use ls -ln to see the numeric uid:gid for a given
> > directory/file.
>
> Hmm!! Entering 'ls -ln' as user gives me 'total 96', nine files and
> eleven directories .... including one (non-used) directory who's
> uid:gid shows as '0:0'.
>
> I wonder if that's why I cannot delete it!! ;-)

0:0 = root:root

However, whether you can delete it or not depends on whether you have
write access to the directory that contains it.

Having write permission on a file only means that you can modify its
contents, but in order to delete or rename the file, you need to have
write permission on its parent directory.

Also note that you cannot change the permissions on a symbolic link --
they always have a permissions mask, but these permissions are never
read. Any attempt to change the permissions on a symlink will forward
the chmod operation to the target of the link, and in that case, the
permissions/ownership of the actual target apply.

--
With respect,
= Aragorn =

On Sat, 04 Sep 2021 10:43:56 -0400, Aragorn <thorongil@telenet.be> wrote:
> Having write permission on a file only means that you can modify its
> contents, but in order to delete or rename the file, you need to have
> write permission on its parent directory.
>
> Also note that you cannot change the permissions on a symbolic link --
> they always have a permissions mask, but these permissions are never
> read. Any attempt to change the permissions on a symlink will forward
> the chmod operation to the target of the link, and in that case, the
> permissions/ownership of the actual target apply.

Also, see https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Never_use_just_su for the most common
cause of root owned files in the user's home directory, and how to fix it.

Regards, Dave Hodgins

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