as the controller of my file server, i want to be able to access all accounts on it without any problems. for some reason, after mounting one of the accounts to my personal home folder from the server, and try putting a file on it, i get this error.

Error "File not found" while copying "/home/justin...s/intro.doc".

I give all accounts (except mine) chmod 550, so that they can't write to their home folder, and can't look in other peoples folder. But when i sign into my account, i want to be able to see everything, and be able to do anything i want. delete files, create files, look into people's home folders. any ideas?

Hi Justin,
This might be a permission issue, or it might be something else. Could you post your /etc/fstab or the mount command you used to manually mount the file system? Is the file system you're mounting on the same server (e.g., separate partition) or is it a network share?

To be thorough, once you have your file system mounted also post the outpout of "cat /etc/mtab".

Scott

Umm, use a root account?

What does it mean to "give all accounts (except mine) chmod 550"? And why would you want to do this? There's no point to denying permissions to the owner of something (since they control the permissions).

If you mounted a partition at your home directory you won't see any of the files that were in that directory. For example, if you have a file called /home/justin/intro.doc and then you mount a partition with something like mount /dev/something /home/justin then the files that were in /home/justin are no longer visible. After you umount with umount /dev/something then /home/justin/intro.doc will again be visible.

You could mount the partition a level lower, for example mount /dev/something /home/justin/mnt and that would work. Either that, or I'm mis-interpreting your error

Please read spooon's reply carefully - if you do chmod 0550 /home/bloggs and bloggs is the owner of /home/bloggs, then bloggs can change the permissions to whatever they like.

I'm guessing by "accounts" he means home directories?

to mount my account on the debian server, i used the program smb4k, which is a graphical program that allows mounting shares and acts as a samba client. and it is a network share because it's not part of the harddrive im using now, its in the server.

here is my /etc/fstab on my ubuntu desktop

and here is the one on my debian server

ubuntu's mtab:


/dev/hda1 / ext3 rw,errors=remount-ro 0 0
proc /proc proc rw 0 0
/sys /sys sysfs rw 0 0
varrun /var/run tmpfs rw 0 0
varlock /var/lock tmpfs rw 0 0
procbususb /proc/bus/usb usbfs rw 0 0
udev /dev tmpfs rw 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,gid=5,mode=620 0 0
devshm /dev/shm tmpfs rw 0 0
lrm /lib/modules/2.6.15-26-386/volatile tmpfs rw 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom-1 udf ro,nosuid,nodev,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=007,iochars$//DEBIAN/ninjamasterbobby /home/justin/debian/DEBIAN/ninjamasterbobby smbfs rw $

debian server's mtab:

/dev/hda2 / ext3 rw,errors=remount-ro 0 0
proc /proc proc rw 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,gid=5,mode=620 0 0
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs rw 0 0
/dev/hda1 /home ext3 rw 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs rw 0 0

and i am using ubuntu so i dont know how to graphically log into root. also, i am denying these permisions because i dont want them to put stuff into the server, i just want them to take stuff from it. in other words i dont want it used as a storage space for their stuff. is there anyway to not let them change their permissions?

Never log into X as root. Ubuntu's good in that way.

If you just want them to 'take', why don't you just create a shared directory that allows access from anyone?

the reason is because there are certain people who i want to only have certain things.

Could you clarify which server is supposed to be doing what and what you are trying to do with the servers? For ex., what directory on which server do you want users to access but not write to? How are users getting access to that directory -- Samba, http, a graphical or terminal session on the file server, NFS?

Scott

This might be one of those occasions where acls are appropriate.

okay, i have a debian server running samba that i want to use as a sort of repository. you can get stuff from it, but you cant add to it. every person's account can't be written to by them, but i want to be able to write and add to it. lets say i made an account for a friend and its called /home/travis/. well, i want travis to only be able to draw from this account, and not be able to store things in this accoutn, for hard drive space reasons. but yet, if i want to give travis something, lets say a text file, i have the power to go into his acount and put that text file in there, without having any permission problems. those people would be using ssh to get to their account.

If you're going to use samba, why not just set "read only = yes" on the shares?

because when the people log on, they are not connecting to samba, they are actually going into the server and accessing their home folders in the server.

Ok, so you want users with full SSH access to be unable to write to any part of the system? That'll need quite a bit of tweaking. Take /tmp for example... any user can write files there.

Securing their home directory... I guess you'd need to create a group for each user, then make their home directory owned by root:<their group> with permissions like 750. Then place files in there and set the owner and permission accordingly as well.