Art Alexion on 18 Nov 2004 15:46:02 -0000


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Re: [PLUG] Sharing home directories between two distros


Art Alexion wrote:

eric@lucii.org wrote:

On Thu, Nov 18, 2004 at 08:01:51AM -0500, Art Alexion wrote:




Meanwhile, temporary mounting for copying between distros is not working right. If I mount Ubuntu's root directory in Red Hat using a simple

  mount /dev/hdb2 /mnt/ubuntu

I can read/write as user to my home directory in /mnt/ubuntu/home/arthur. But a corollary command in Ubuntu

  mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/rh_homes

will not permit a regular user to even view /mnt/rh_homes/arthur.

Does this have anything to do with the fact that there is no root user/password in Ubuntu -- instead uses sudo with regular user's password?

I'm not sure about that because, until last week, I've never even *heard* of
a distro called "ubuntu" :-P


It's Debian-based.  Don't know how it varies from Debian Sarge.

I'd try: sudo mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/rh_homes

Also you will have to match the user and group IDs.
If you are uid 501 in RedHat then you must be 501 in ubuntu.




tried editing /etc/fstab by adding the line

/dev/hdb1 /mnt/rh_homes ext3 rw,user 0 1


then: sudo mount /mnt/rh_homes

Still no access because, as you warned, I am UID 500 in Red Hat, and UID 1000 in Ubuntu. The inability to su or login as root has me freaked out, though. When I use the gui "Users & Groups" tool [prompts for password before launching], and change my UID to 500, I disappear from the Users list. A menu item lets me display all users, and there I am. But it makes me nervous.

I did it once before using Mandrake [which made me UID 501]. After changing to UID 500, I closed the gui, and from the command line issued the command

   # chown 500:users -R /home/arthur

Worked fine, but Ubuntu won't let me login as root, and I don't know if I can do anything as a regular user that temporarily has no home directory due to missing config files, etc. In other words, if I can't log in as arthur, I can't sudo.

The shell includes the regular su command, but it won't take my user password as sudo does, and the installation program did not let me pick a root password.

I really appreciate the help you are giving me.



I just had another idea. Move ~/.mozilla & ~/Documents to /home/common, Create a symlink in their original locations to point to the new locations, then create symlinks in Ubuntu to /mnt/rh_homes/common/.mozilla and Documents.

If I do, what should I change the ownership to in the common directory tree so that both user 500 and user 1000 can access the files. Also, how can I insure that files saved to common by applications such as Mozilla and OpenOffice have the correct permissions by default?

--

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