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    [Lab 5.1 Group Management] Couldn't create file under "somedir": Permission denied

    Posts: 9
    edited April 2024 in LFS207 Class Forum

    Following the instructions in the document for Lab 5.1 where you have to create a file as a user belonging to a group inside a directory placed under another user's home directory, I only kept getting this error:

    1. 📦[bullwinkle@linux-sysadmin-course ~]$ touch /home/rocky/somedir/somefile
    2. touch: cannot touch '/home/rocky/somedir/somefile': Permission denied

    I figured out later that the outputs of ls -l weren't the same for the systems I tried it on (Fedora 38, openSUSE Tumbleweed 20240310, Debian 11), e.g. my Fedora distrobox:

    1. 📦[rocky@linux-sysadmin-course ~]$ ls -l
    2. total 4
    3. drwxr-xr-x 2 rocky bosses 4096 Mar 13 17:22 somedir

    Compared to the walkthrough provided:

    1. $ ls -l
    2. total 16
    3. -rw-r--r-- 1 rocky rocky 8980 Oct 4 2013 examples.desktop
    4. drwxrwxr-x 2 rocky bosses 4096 Oct 30 09:53 somedir

    i.e. the write permissions weren't granted on the directory for me, but they were (by default?) in the example.

    I don't know if this was intended or not, but I felt like I should have made a post about this.

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    Comments

    • Posts: 1,264

      Hi @fabv , what is the distro and version that didn't work for you? I can try to reproduce the issue.

      Regards,
      Luis.

    • Posts: 9
      edited April 2024

      Hi! The details are in my post already:

      the systems I tried it on (Fedora 38, openSUSE Tumbleweed 20240310, Debian 11)

      I can provide more details if needed, the Fedora container I used for my own example has this for its /etc/os-release:

      1. $ cat /etc/os-release
      2. NAME="Fedora Linux"
      3. VERSION="38 (Container Image)"
      4. ID=fedora
      5. VERSION_ID=38
      6. VERSION_CODENAME=""
      7. PLATFORM_ID="platform:f38"
      8. PRETTY_NAME="Fedora Linux 38 (Container Image)"
      9. ANSI_COLOR="0;38;2;60;110;180"
      10. LOGO=fedora-logo-icon
      11. CPE_NAME="cpe:/o:fedoraproject:fedora:38"
      12. DEFAULT_HOSTNAME="fedora"
      13. HOME_URL="https://fedoraproject.org/"
      14. DOCUMENTATION_URL="https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/f38/system-administrators-guide/"
      15. SUPPORT_URL="https://ask.fedoraproject.org/"
      16. BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugzilla.redhat.com/"
      17. REDHAT_BUGZILLA_PRODUCT="Fedora"
      18. REDHAT_BUGZILLA_PRODUCT_VERSION=38
      19. REDHAT_SUPPORT_PRODUCT="Fedora"
      20. REDHAT_SUPPORT_PRODUCT_VERSION=38
      21. SUPPORT_END=2024-05-14
      22. VARIANT="Container Image"
      23. VARIANT_ID=container
    • Posts: 9

      To add, after reading the umask lesson and seeing the "Demo: umask" video, I noticed that it does look like at the time of writing them, those systems had a default umask of 0002 instead of the current 0022 I get on my systems.
      I don't know where to look to say when this change could have been implemented.

    • Posts: 1,264

      Hi @fabv ,

      I tested it on Fedora 38 and I was able to reproduce the issue. So the workaround is the following:

      1.- Move or copy the test to /tmp/ , so in some distros will be easier to avoid specific setups about the user directories.

      I used 'cp -Rpv somedir/ /tmp/' in order to preserve the permissions on the directory.

      2.- You need to give write permissions over somedir/ directory for the bosses group, so that way the bullwinkle user will be able to write on it.

      I did that as rocky user and:

      chmod 771 /tmp/somedir/

      And that was enough.

      Regards,
      Luis.

    • Posts: 9

      Thanks for confirming and for providing another solution!

      Personally, I had solved that by simply giving write permissions on the directory to the group:

      1. chmod g+x somedir
    • Posts: 1,264

      Hi @fabv,

      Yeah, that works. It's similar to step 2 I put above.

      Regards,
      Luis.

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