Re: Lesson learned / file permissions

From: Andreas Janssen (andreas.janssen_at_bigfoot.com)
Date: 10/20/04

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    To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 13:27:19 +0200

    Hello

    Olle Eriksson (<pt00oer@student.bth.se>) wrote:

    > In one of my moments last night I thought, why should any of the files
    > in my home directory need to be world-accessible? I didn't think long
    > about it before I decided to remove all read, write and execute rights
    > for world. Before I did that, however (and thank god for that), I
    > saved all the existing permissions to a file:
    >
    > $ find /home/username/ -xdev -printf "%m %p\n" > permissions.txt
    >
    > Then:
    >
    > $ sudo chmod o-rwx /home/username/*
    > $ sudo chmod o-rwx /home/username/.*

    All files in your /home should be yours, so it should be sufficient to
    run chmod as a user. BTW, you are lucky you didn't run the second chmod
    with the -R option, like I did a while ago. .* also includes ..

    > After that, all hell broke lose. I couldn't start any new KDE
    > application, existing applications complained about insufficient
    > rights, no temporary or session files could be written etc. I couldn't
    > even access my home directory after I restarted. Luckily I was able to
    > restore all previous file permissions with the saved file and got back
    > into my user account this morning. So, lesson learned. Don't mess with
    > things you don't need to mess with, make backups, and be less
    > paranoid. :)
    >
    > I think it was the fact that /home lost all world-permissions that
    > caused all the problems. Would you agree?

    No. My home folder and everything inside is set to go-rwx.

    > Secondly, by calling chmod with sudo, all the files owned by root that
    > I as a user needed to see were now invisible. But they don't seem to
    > be so many so I am wondering if that had any influence.

    Aha. So there are files in your home folder, that you need, and that are
    owned by root? Why? I guess the problem is that they belonged to root.
    With the restrictive permissions, you could not access them. The change
    I would make is not to make them world-readable. Instead use chown to
    change the owner from root to olle.

    best regards
     Andreas Janssen 

    -- 
Andreas Janssen <andreas.janssen@bigfoot.com>
PGP-Key-ID: 0xDC801674 ICQ #17079270
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http://www.andreas-janssen.de/debian-tipps.html
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