[Cinnamon] Deleting an user destroyed entire /var/

gruby · 2015-09-30 02:51:47

Hi.

I've installed Cinnamon, switched from AwesomeWM and played a little.
Also I've switched from Slim to LightDM to be 100% systemd compatible.

After that I saw on login screen some "special" users, and one of them was named "brightd".
I ran Cinnamon users panel (cinnamon-settings-users), authorized as root, and deleted that account.
I "recovered" a lot of disk space on my root partition, but lost /var/

I don't know what's happened. I didn't check how "brightd" was defined and what home dir was set for him.
I don't know who was "brightd" (maybe some orphan, after package removed long time ago?).

Yes, I was careless while deleting user`s account. But I never expected something like that.
I thought that GUI application should not allow to destroy whole nor part of OS.
Deleting user account should not destroy system files, I think...

I'm writing this mostly for caution - just be careful when deleting user accounts with Cinnamon.
But also wondering is this a bug of Cinnamon or an OS feature...?
Maybe someone has "brightd" user defined and can post here info about him to help reproduce same or similar scenario?

EDIT:
It seems that Cinnamon uses AccountService from freedesktop.org when deleting user account, and AccountService calls "userdel" command with "-rf" args.
So probably this is not related to Cinnamon, but to userdel...

PS. I must reinstall my OS, because Pacman DB and pacman.log were destroyed together.
Thats why you should beware GUI frontends and use terminal instead

Marcin

Last edited by gruby (2015-09-30 03:17:13)

mrunion · 2015-09-30 23:40:51

gruby wrote:

Thats why you should beware GUI frontends

Though true, it is equally -- if not more so -- important to make sure you investigate things like this before deleting anything. It may have shown that whatever the brightd user was for had /var as a home folder.

Last edited by mrunion (2015-09-30 23:41:19)

superchango · 2015-10-01 04:24:36

Did you read the wiki page for "Lightdm"? It say that by default Lightdm show system and service users too, not only users-user.

gruby · 2015-10-04 08:32:54

I didn't read lightdm man but this is not an issue.

The problem is that Cinnamon/Freedesktop calls `userdel` with `-f (force)` flag. As userdel`s man says the `force` flag is dangerous and should be used carefully (http://linux.die.net/man/8/userdel). The GUI should do some pre-deletion checks and tell a user what will be deleted or should warn about possibility of the system destruction.

Cheers,
Marcin

Alad · 2015-10-04 08:36:40

There's https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/brightd/ but it doesn't seem to create a new user ...

Either way, I'd file a bug against accountsservice.

Last edited by Alad (2015-10-04 08:37:50)

Arch Linux

#1 2015-09-30 02:51:47

[Cinnamon] Deleting an user destroyed entire /var/

#2 2015-09-30 23:40:51

Re: [Cinnamon] Deleting an user destroyed entire /var/

#3 2015-10-01 04:24:36

Re: [Cinnamon] Deleting an user destroyed entire /var/

#4 2015-10-04 08:32:54

Re: [Cinnamon] Deleting an user destroyed entire /var/

#5 2015-10-04 08:36:40

Re: [Cinnamon] Deleting an user destroyed entire /var/

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