[SOLVED] /home/username owned by root and refuses chown from root.

eric.meehan · 2020-05-17 20:29:04

On a fresh install of Arch, I created a user with sudo permissions. The user's home directory is owned by root for some reason. (I am using this computer as a Minecraft server... trying to anyway).

ls -l /home/username

drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 May 16 19:14 minecraft

When I login as root, I cannot change the ownership of this directory to the user:

chown username /home/username

chown: changing ownership of '/home/username': Operation not permitted

I've tried doing this as root and username (the only two users on the system) and neither can change the ownership of this directory. I cannot run the command to install Minecraft-server unless I have write permissions as the user, as I cannot do so as the root.

makepkg -si

(from within the git download).

I have Arch running on several machines, this is the only one that set the ownership of /home/username to root. Why would it do this? How would I fix it?

Thanks!

Last edited by eric.meehan (2020-05-17 22:53:28)

loqs · 2020-05-17 20:32:33

What command was used to create the user username?

seth · 2020-05-17 20:42:32

Also we've so far only seen the permissions of he minecraft directory nor the actual error when you try to change the owner as root (which *will* be required)

stat /home/username
grep username /etc/passwd
sudo chown username:username /home/username
mount

Trilby · 2020-05-17 20:43:24

Are you using systemd-homed? What's the output of `stat /home/username` and `findmnt /home/username`?

eric.meehan · 2020-05-17 21:11:04

loqs wrote:

What command was used to create the user username?

During install I used

 
useradd -m -g users -G wheel username

I also edited visudo to allow the group wheel to use sudo by uncommenting the line:

%wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL

eric.meehan · 2020-05-17 21:17:48

Trilby wrote:

Are you using systemd-homed? What's the output of `stat /home/username` and `findmnt /home/username`?

seth wrote:

stat /home/username
grep username /etc/passwd
sudo chown username:username /home/username
mount

I'm going to stop editing my username to "username" in the commands to give the output more precisely.

stat /home/eric

  File: /home/eric
  Size: 4096      	Blocks: 8          IO Block: 4096   directory
Device: 801h/2049d	Inode: 3           Links: 3
Access: (0755/drwxr-xr-x)  Uid: (    0/    root)   Gid: (    0/    root)
Access: 2020-05-17 00:00:00.000000000 +0000
Modify: 2020-05-17 13:21:42.000000000 +0000
Change: 2020-05-17 13:13:44.500000000 +0000
 Birth: -

grep /etc/passwd

eric:x:1000:985::/home/eric:/bin/bash

This next one gave output indicating the command wasn't properly written, so I edited it. Original:

sudo chown eric:eric /home/eric

chown: invalid group: 'eric:eric'

Edited:

sudo chown eric:users /home/eric

chown: changing ownership of '/home/eric': Operation not permitted

 
mount

proc on /proc type proc (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
sys on /sys type sysfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
dev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,nosuid,relatime,size=1729108k,nr_inodes=432277,mode=755)
run on /run type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,mode=755)
efivarfs on /sys/firmware/efi/efivars type efivarfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
/dev/sda2 on / type ext4 (rw,relatime)
securityfs on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000)
tmpfs on /sys/fs/cgroup type tmpfs (ro,nosuid,nodev,noexec,mode=755)
cgroup2 on /sys/fs/cgroup/unified type cgroup2 (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,nsdelegate)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,xattr,name=systemd)
pstore on /sys/fs/pstore type pstore (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
none on /sys/fs/bpf type bpf (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,mode=700)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu,cpuacct type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,cpu,cpuacct)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/freezer type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,freezer)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/devices type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,devices)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/pids type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,pids)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/net_cls,net_prio type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,net_cls,net_prio)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,cpuset)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/perf_event type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,perf_event)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,blkio)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/memory type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,memory)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/hugetlb type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,hugetlb)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/rdma type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,rdma)
systemd-1 on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type autofs (rw,relatime,fd=29,pgrp=1,timeout=0,minproto=5,maxproto=5,direct,pipe_ino=11071)
mqueue on /dev/mqueue type mqueue (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
tracefs on /sys/kernel/tracing type tracefs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
debugfs on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
hugetlbfs on /dev/hugepages type hugetlbfs (rw,relatime,pagesize=2M)
tmpfs on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
configfs on /sys/kernel/config type configfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
/dev/sda1 on /home type vfat (rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,utf8,errors=remount-ro)
tmpfs on /run/user/0 type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,size=347496k,mode=700)

findmnt /home/eric

(returns nothing)

Thanks for the help!

Last edited by eric.meehan (2020-05-17 21:22:24)

jasonwryan · 2020-05-17 21:19:43

Why is your /home formatted as FAT?

eric.meehan · 2020-05-17 21:24:47

jasonwryan wrote:

Why is your /home formatted as FAT?

It was not. I formatted the boot partition as FAT, but /home is a linux filesystem.

If you have a command I can use to double check this, I would appreciate it.

seth · 2020-05-17 21:29:52

sudo file -s /dev/sda1

Did you accidentally mount the boot partition at /home?

merlock · 2020-05-17 21:29:57

eric.meehan wrote:

jasonwryan wrote:
Why is your /home formatted as FAT?
It was not. I formatted the boot partition as FAT, but /home is a linux filesystem.

Yes, it is. Look at the output of your mount command:

eric.meehan's mount command wrote:

/dev/sda1 on /home type vfat (rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,utf8,errors=remount-ro)

eric.meehan · 2020-05-17 22:24:38

seth wrote:

sudo file -s /dev/sda1
Did you accidentally mount the boot partition at /home?

merlock wrote:

Yes, it is. Look at the output of your mount command:

Well I'll be damned. Sorry about that, when I installed the os I mounted /dev/sda2 to /home like I did on my other installations (unless I made a typo during the procedure. The computer is old and has sticky keys). Why would that affect the permissions?

loqs · 2020-05-17 22:40:06

FAT does not have a concept of user / group ownership so the kernel assigns root by default.

eric.meehan · 2020-05-17 22:53:07

loqs wrote:

FAT does not have a concept of user / group ownership so the kernel assigns root by default.

It seems I made a mistake during the installation. Thanks for the help!

Arch Linux

#1 2020-05-17 20:29:04

[SOLVED] /home/username owned by root and refuses chown from root.

#2 2020-05-17 20:32:33

Re: [SOLVED] /home/username owned by root and refuses chown from root.

#3 2020-05-17 20:42:32

Re: [SOLVED] /home/username owned by root and refuses chown from root.

#4 2020-05-17 20:43:24

Re: [SOLVED] /home/username owned by root and refuses chown from root.

#5 2020-05-17 21:11:04

Re: [SOLVED] /home/username owned by root and refuses chown from root.

#6 2020-05-17 21:17:48

Re: [SOLVED] /home/username owned by root and refuses chown from root.

#7 2020-05-17 21:19:43

Re: [SOLVED] /home/username owned by root and refuses chown from root.

#8 2020-05-17 21:24:47

Re: [SOLVED] /home/username owned by root and refuses chown from root.

#9 2020-05-17 21:29:52

Re: [SOLVED] /home/username owned by root and refuses chown from root.

#10 2020-05-17 21:29:57

Re: [SOLVED] /home/username owned by root and refuses chown from root.

#11 2020-05-17 22:24:38

Re: [SOLVED] /home/username owned by root and refuses chown from root.

#12 2020-05-17 22:40:06

Re: [SOLVED] /home/username owned by root and refuses chown from root.

#13 2020-05-17 22:53:07

Re: [SOLVED] /home/username owned by root and refuses chown from root.

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