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I am not user 500. I do not know what that really means.
Perhaps if I tell you how I got into this predicament where I need to look at Linux (which I am actually enjoying - it is amazing how stuff from the past comes back - just not enough).
My son installed Gentoo. He is away at the snow for the season. All my internet access is via Linux, and I use the apache server for publishing to the web. This was via a user he had set up for me - peter - with a password of (like) "abcdefgh" - no numbers in it when I logged in thru putty.
For an unknown reason, the user peter disappeared off the Linux machine. I really do not know how. I didn't do it consciously, and extremely unlikely inadvertently. (?)
So I went in as root and eventually typed -
"useradd -g peter peter"
Now I can get in as peter, but the access rights do not appear clear to me.
I do vaguely remember that in Unix I was able to be clear about access rights using a set of commands, but cannot remember what they were - ls, pwd, stat ....?
Also When I allocated a password to peter, the passwd process would not accept a fully alphabetic password. As above - I was using an alphabetic password. Can I change the password to all alpha?
Linux' permissions are based on the numeric
userid's, the names are just convenience.
It appears that on that box there once was
a user peter with the numerical userid 500.
He then must have been removed, but the
home stayed ...
The one you created has the userid 2002,
and belongs to the group 500, which happens
to be the same group the other peter belonged
to.
Looking at the access rights (all users homes
have r-x for others and group) you can freely
cd into and ls and less files and all that, but you
can't write (despite the identical name).
You can do two things:
a) remove the user peter and the home directory
of peter, and start over.
b) chown -R peter:peter /home/peter
May I ask which part of NZ you are from (if this thread isn't OT enough) - a friend is thinking of moving there, if you live any where near Wellington (or have a friend there), do you reckon you could let me know what sort of place it is / the weather. Looking around on the internet paints a fairly nice place with weather similar to England, but a little nicer :)
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