hi i'm new so maybe this will be obvious to somebody.

i am setting up a linux dual boot on mine and my parents computer so it's set up right, before making it the permanent os.

i've made the users so family members can have their various preferences and i wanted to make an area for files to be accessible to all users, mp3's etc.

as root i used chmod to allow the use of the /home directory by all users. this worked for a while and ls -l confirmed the new permisions.
later i went to write something into the /home directory to find it had reverted to the original permissions. This is after i had writen data there as a user [not root] already.
While i don't know why, this is happening and on closer observation seems to happen within about 10 mins.
Is the home folder specially protected or is there a problem with the permissions being saved to disk somehow?
i have not noticed this happening anywhere else in the file system.

i am using mandriva LE 2005 with kde

Ok. I'd run across this under 10.0, and finally figured it all out, but had forgotten. So I went looking. Turns out the interface I'd used under 10.0 isn't there anymore.

Anyway, your culpret is msec (Mandrive Security). Which is pretty handy and all, can just cause some problems. If you check your /etc/cron.hourly, I bet you see it in there. Now, you can get rid of it (check cron.daily as well), or you can change its behavior. To do so, you'll need to know the msec level that you are running under (check /etc/sysconfig/msec under the SECURE_LEVEL variable). Once you know that, pop over to /usr/share/msec. In this directory are your configuration files. If you look in the perm file for your security level (mine is set to 3, so perm.3 for me), you'll see a listing of directories, owners, and permissions. When that cron job kicks off every hour, it sets the owner and permissions for those directories. Just find the home directory and set the permissions to what you want.

There might be a GUI interface for this, but I couldn't find one on my 2005LE system, though I remember it in the Control Center under 10.0.

Ok thanks i'll give that a look.
At least i know whats happening now, thanks for the tip!