Discussion between austinian and igal

5:47 PM

Q: group permissions on directory being ignored for user

It seems that there is a Linux user (on an Ubuntu 12.04.4 server) who is unable to access a shared directory, even though that user belongs to the group which owns the directory. Here is an example session: $ whoami username $ cd /shared_directory bash: cd: /shared_directory: Permission denied ...

austinian

Is the user the owner of the files? The "owner" access is all set to deny!

igal

No, the user is not the owner of the directory; the directory is owned by root. And I don't think that the "owner" access is set to deny; "others" is set to deny.

austinian

You, sir, are completely right. I don't know what I was thinking when I made that comment.

What filesystem is being used?

igal

No worries. I'm sure I'll feel that way about my post by this time tomorrow.

The filesystem is ext4.

Hey. I'm pretty new to stackexchange; I haven't used chat before. Is this real time?

austinian

yes

igal

5:51 PM

I should also add that I've actually resolved the issue by deleting and recreating the user's entry in our LDAP server. But I'd still like to understand why it happened, and why it's possible to get the kind of behavior I was observing.

austinian

alright, so, something I'm noticing also is that the group permissions are set to s in the execute bit

igal

Yes, that's correct.

austinian

is that setuid or setgid?

hmm... alright, that's weird

did the UID change on the *nix system when you recreated the user?

I don't know enough about your environment to begin to ponder how this happened, it's just really weird

igal

No, I'm pretty sure I made sure that the GID was the same.

austinian