I have a Synology NAS where I have set up user ‘vaessen’ years ago. There this user has UID 1026, the lowest number that is possible on this NAS. On OpenSuSE, where my user name is ‘vaessen’ too, the UID defaults to 1000 at installation. As user ‘vaessen’ on OpenSuSE, I want to access the files on the NAS without problems and the way to do this (and has been for years) is by changing my UID to 1026 in OpenSuSE too. But recently I switched to Btrfs to make use of snapshots. I now find that I cannot start from any Btrfs snapshot dating before the change of the UID to 1026. That is to say: as soon as the login screen comes and I type in my password, the login screen reappears again. This goes on and on. The password is recognized as correct, because typing in a wrong password leads to an error message. My OpenSuSE version is Leap 16.1. Can anyone explain this?
You change to an earlier snapshot.
In that earlier snapshot, your UID will still be 1000 at least in “/etc/passwd”. I’m not sure about your home directory. That may well still be at UID of 1026. In that case, you are attempting to login as a user who does not own the home directory.
In my experience, login when you don’t own the home directory does work for a command line login, but not for a graphic desktop login. Instead, you are dropped back to the login screen.
My suggestion: At install, set the user name to something else other than “vaessen”. Then create a new user with name “vaessen” and UID 1026.
It could also be SELinux labels? A user on IRC today had that issue with just changing their user passwords…
Thanks. I think that explains it. It is not that important fortunately because there is few reason to ever rollback a snapshot made that early.
I have no idea. I have been using OpenSuSE since 2003 but never dived into the deep.