Hi,

I had a custom install of Fedora Core 4 on a couple of machines. I noticed that the permissions on the home directories have permissions set as 755 on every home directory.

This allows other users to peek into other user's home directores. Where do I change the default permissions set on home directories when they are created?

This shouldn't be a default config for a linux box. Was there something that I missed during the initial install?

Thanks,

Hi psychobyte,

It would help if you filled in the "Distribution" section of your profile - that way we would know what distribution you are using.

I am afraid that, because all distros are different and run different Window Managers, I don't have a clue how to set home directories to have certain perms when they are created.

You can, however, do a "chmod 700 /home/user" on each home directory - that would work. I'm not sure if doing a "chmod 700 /home" would solve your problem?

Cheers,

-jk

As J_K9 says..u can run chmod ..a recursive chmod could be something like chmod -R 700 /home but this shouldnt be the ideal way .Whenever the profile files are copied into the users home directory you should add a line to the script which says chmod -R /home/username so you dont have to do it manually each time.

To find out all the directories that currently have permissions as 755 you should use the find call.Read up on the man for the syntax...coz I have trouble remmebering it

shd be something like find /home -perm 755 -print

Cheers
Arvind

If you "chmod -R 700 /home" then most likely the only user to access this directory will be root since the ownership is probably root:root. You could change the individual user directories though. As far as setting the default permissions, read up on umask.

chmod -R 1755 /home/<user_name>

try this, if it cause some error, change it back.

Stickman's umask hint is OK. Just don't follow llmmix' advice: that's nice, but IT'S WRONG.

But umask only affects the permissions of files and folders created by the user after they've been created doesn't it? For example I just did a test on my Centos4 machine here doing a simple 'useradd test'. It created /home/test with 700 permissions. My root umask is 0022.

I'd be very interested to know where useradd decides what perms to apply to the newly created home dirs.

Useradd is not a good test. Use mkdir or touch instead. umask is the permission template for new files and directories. A umask of 022 should give you a 755 directory or 644 file.

Yeah my umask is correct, but what I was asking is what does useradd use to set the permissions on the home directory? AFAICT It doesn't look like its root's umask so it must be something else.