Permissions question
 

I am going to switch OSes from RH8.0 to RH9.0. I plan on doing a full reinstall, but I have three hard drives on the server. One has the OS and apps, the other is used for a file server, and the third is a backup. I'm only going to be formatting the OS drive. Will there be any permission issues in accessing the other two drives after I reinstall?

Will I have to create the same user accounts again in order to regain access to everything? If not, could you explain the mechanics behind it?

Users will need to be recreated. But you could write a script to parse (from your current OS HDD) the /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow ... and write the neccessary useradd command line parameters to a file which you will later be executing on the freshly installed one. Also, did you consider the update option ?

I've got several issues with the OS that after constant discussion with Redhat on bugzilla have not been resolved. Therefore I want a clean, fresh install.

I think what I'll do is just chmod 777 both drives entirely and see how that works. Then I can just recreate the users and chown the files, chmod them back (and this is a well organized file system... a couple recursive chmods will do the job) and be done with it.

Thanks for the info. :)

Or you could leave everything as it is and simply recreate the same users when you do the new install. That's all it takes....

777 is a bad idea *search google for answer*

su
chown -R bobbyJoe.bobbyJoe /path/to/files
exit

to have bobbyJoe free access those files.