Arch Linux

Stunix

Arch Linux f@h Team Member

From: Reading, UK

Registered: 2008-09-12

Posts: 17

Arch forgets which groups ive set for my users

Hello All,

After the last two pacman -Syu upgrades I've done on my x86_64 machine I have noticed a very disturbing thing. Basically the groups that my normal user is affiliated to get reset back to the basic "users" group. This essentially screws up my ability to play music, mount my usb drives and burn cd's. Now obviously this problem is easily fixed with a:

gpasswd -a <user> <group>

The only reason I am posting is this to see if others have had this problem and help me diagnose why it happens. I would rather keep my group affiliations after each full system upgrade if possible. Anyone able to help?

Cheers,

Last edited by Stunix (2008-12-10 16:21:26)

phrakture

Arch Overlord

From: behind you

Registered: 2003-10-29

Posts: 7,879

Website

Re: Arch forgets which groups ive set for my users

Are you merging you /etc/passwd and /etc/group files? Have you logged out and back in? When you run gpasswd, check the contents of /etc/group

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http://phraktured.net

jamtat

Member

Registered: 2008-03-13

Posts: 224

Re: Arch forgets which groups ive set for my users

Same thing happened on my (i686) system. I simply replaced /etc/groups with the old version pacman left archived on my system (as /etc/groups.pacnew, if memory serves).

James

PS I found this out because auto-mounting of removable media stopped working and one of the suggestions to fix that was to add the user to the storage group. I inspected /etc/groups to double-check whether I had added my user to the storage group and discovered that my user was no longer a member of groups I knew I had added him to. So, as I said, I replaced /etc/groups with the archived version.

Stunix

Arch Linux f@h Team Member

From: Reading, UK

Registered: 2008-09-12

Posts: 17

Re: Arch forgets which groups ive set for my users

Well i've just checked my box and found that there are no /etc/groups.pacnew or /etc/passwd.pacnew files. I have to admit I have gotten a little lapse in my checking of things like that since I finished University. I tend to leave the system on 24-7 as it's a joint use sever/desktop system, however I had rebooted and that is when the updates caused my system to lose the group memberships I had given it. Is it possible that doing multiple pacman -Syu commands before a reboot could have caused this?