Dolphin says my Group is 1002.

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi

Whilst investigating something else today i accidentally discovered that Dolphin, in both my Tower & Lappy, says that my Group is “1002”, when i expected it to say “users”. Then i looked via Konsole; User Rachel looks ok i think, but GooeyGirl’s Permissions & Group is kinda weird / wrong, IMO:

gooeygirl@linux-Tower:~> cd /home
gooeygirl@linux-Tower:/home> **ls -l**
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 17 rachel  users 4096 Jul 22 23:54 rachel
drwx------ 58 gooeygirl  1002 4096 Aug  8 16:47 gooeygirl
gooeygirl@linux-Tower:/home> 

gooeygirl@linux-Tower:~> cd /home/gooeygirl
gooeygirl@linux-Tower:~> **ls -l**
total 10708
drwxrwxr-x 2 gooeygirl  1002     4096 Aug  5 17:27 bin
drwxr-xr-x 2 gooeygirl  1002      274 Aug  5 17:26 Desktop
drwxr-xr-x 9 gooeygirl  1002     4096 Jul 11 13:57 Documents
drwxr-xr-x 5 gooeygirl users     4096 Aug  1 18:40 Downloads
-rw------- 1 root    root  10940468 Jul 25 20:21 –force
drwxr-xr-x 2 gooeygirl  1002       22 Apr 12 21:54 Music
drwxr-xr-x 3 gooeygirl  1002      208 Jul 24 10:26 Pictures
drwxr-xr-x 2 gooeygirl users        6 Jul 22 21:48 Public
drwxr-xr-x 2 gooeygirl users       24 Jul 22 21:46 public_html
drwxrwxr-x 4 gooeygirl  1002     4096 Aug  5 23:52 temp
drwxr-xr-x 2 gooeygirl users        6 Jul 22 21:48 Templates
drwxr-xr-x 2 gooeygirl  1002      209 Jul 14 14:03 Videos
drwxrwxr-x 8 gooeygirl  1002     4096 Aug  8 16:46 VM Share Folder
gooeygirl@linux-Tower:~>

In contrast, the following is what i expected:

gooeygirl@linux-Tower:~> **groups
**users vboxusers wheel


gooeygirl@linux-Tower:~> **id**
uid=1000(gooeygirl) gid=100(users) groups=100(users),470(vboxusers),492(wheel)
gooeygirl@linux-Tower:~>

Does anyone know what Group 1002 is, &/or how this strange change might have occurred [on [i]both PCs]? Should i revert my user group = me] to “users” via:

gooeygirl@linux-Tower:/home> ***sudo chown -R gooeygirl:users gooeygirl***

Thanks.

2
  1. You can see what groups are defined in your system with
cat /etc/group
  1. 1002 is apparently NOT in that list because else it would have been showed as the Group Name and not as the GID. (compare GID 1000 which has users as Group Name and thus ls shows the name and not the id).
  2. I have no idea why 1002 is attached to those files. Did you copy them in a specific way from some other system?
  3. The group wheel is not really used in openSUSE. I have no idea why user gooeygirl has wheel as a secundary group, that is not normally done at user creation in openSUSE.

In short, it looks to me if you have some left overs from another system then openSUSE. Maybe multi-boot witth another Linux while using the same /home directory (e.g. by /home being a partition mounted on several systems)?

3

Thanks for the fast reply Henk.

Yes as expected, there’s no 1002 here:

gooeygirl@linux-Tower:/home> cat /etc/groupat:x:25:
audio:x:489:pulse
avahi:x:477:
bin:x:1:daemon
brlapi:x:493:
cdrom:x:488:
colord:x:480:
daemon:x:2:
dialout:x:16:
disk:x:487:
ftp:x:49:
gdm:x:471:
input:x:486:
kmem:x:491:
lightdm:x:474:
lock:x:490:
lp:x:7:
mail:x:12:postfix
maildrop:x:59:postfix
man:x:62:
messagebus:x:499:
mysql:x:494:
nm-openconnect:x:472:
nm-openvpn:x:473:
nobody:x:65533:
nogroup:x:65534:nobody
nscd:x:495:
ntadmin:x:71:
ntp:x:483:
polkitd:x:496:
postfix:x:51:
pulse:x:479:
pulse-access:x:478:
root:x:0:
rtkit:x:482:
scard:x:481:
sddm:x:475:
shadow:x:15:
sshd:x:498:
sys:x:3:
tape:x:497:
tftp:x:484:dnsmasq,tftp
tty:x:5:
utmp:x:22:
vboxusers:x:470:rachel,gooeygirl
video:x:485:gdm
wheel:x:492:rachel,gooeygirl
winbind:x:476:
www:x:8:
srvGeoClue:x:994:
systemd-coredump:x:997:
systemd-journal:x:999:
systemd-network:x:998:
systemd-timesync:x:996:
trusted:x:995:
users:x:100:gooeygirl
gooeygirl@linux-Tower:/home>

No, my TW’s in both PCs were clean-installs, & i don’t multi-boot. Home is not shared, but… post-installation i did then Restore all my data into Home using BackInTime from my previous OS. Maybe that process created this strange outcome.

Wheel was my fault; post-install i added the users to that group. I now cannot remember why i did it *. Given your advice, i’m happy to remove that group membership from my users.

To the final question: would it be advisable that i do proceed with the chown to return all users to the “users” group, pls?*

4

Well, it is the same sort of action. You have now files on your system that were created on a system where the user/group management was different.

But it looks also as if you have restored /etc/group from another system. Many group names - GID combinations are different from an openSUSE setup :(.

I can only say here that you should not believe things, but should have a sound understanding and reason. So better remove wheel as additional group from your two users.

There is more “wrong” there.
The chown only makes the GID he owning GID of the files. It does NOT “return users to group users”.

I e.g. doubt that users is the primary group for gooeygirl, because gooeygirl is added to users:x:100 as an extra group.

When you want to know what the primary group for a user is, you look in /etc/passwd:

grep gooeygirl /etc/passwd
grep rachel /etc/passwd

The fourth field has the primary GID.

In short you created a small mess :). And as usual, it is always more difficult to disentangle a mess then it is to create. It is also best to change things for users when they are not logged in.

I can try to give you a step by step approach, but I think it is best to have the two password lines first. And we then still have the “non openSUSE” /etc/group. I do not know what negative effects it will have in the future. Nor what the negative effects will be if we replace that blindly. And the fact that you have that strange /etc/group also lets me fear that there maybe more of those. Thus I assume that it is imminent for you to reconstruct what you “restored” from that backup of another system.*

5

Henk

I’m unsure why you seem fixated / critical on / of my BiT Restore. I did NOT restore my previous distro’s root system settings, i restored my data, ie, my spreadsheets, my pdfs, my documents, my browser settings, music, videos, Thunderbird data etc. Also the personalisation settings for my favourite pgms, I emphatically did NOT restore any of the KDE Plasma system settings from my previous distro, as i know from painful learning last year how many problems that can cause.

You have now files on your system that were created on a system where the user/group management was different

Well yes, that statement is undeniable, but i perceive a tone of criticism in your words. Had i not restored all my documents, my new TW installation would be semi-useless, ie, i’d have lost years of my work. That of course is a ludicrous proposition, which i doubt you are making, but then what point you are making is unclear to me.

it looks also as if you have restored /etc/group from another system

Maybe it looks that way to you, but i certainly did not do what you just said.

Many group names - GID combinations are different from an openSUSE setup

That sounds bad, & in need of correction, but at the moment i have no idea what might have caused it.


gooeygirl@linux-Tower:~> grep gooeygirl /etc/passwd
gooeygirl:x:1000:**100**:gooeygirl:/home/gooeygirl:/bin/bash

gooeygirl@linux-Tower:~> grep rachel /etc/passwd
rachel:x:1001:**100**:Rachel:/home/rachel:/bin/bash
gooeygirl@linux-Tower:~>

So both users are in group 100, ie, users, which is what i originally believed.

In short you created a small mess

Is it absolutely necessary to insult & mock me? Is it a condition of seeking help here that i must be belittled?

Thus I assume that it is imminent for you to reconstruct what you “restored” from that backup of another system.

I do not understand what you mean, although it almost seems that you decided to have one more criticism of the fact i restored my data.

If you feel that the system is so badly screwed up that the cleanest thing to do is start over again with a fresh install, then i will… but if so, pls note that i am not willing to not restore all my documents/files afterwards, ie, “data”… & i can’t seriously believe that any ordinary user would accept a recommendation that if they wish to use oS then they have to be willing to forego all their historical personal files.

6

Sorry, but I took some time and effort to try to understand what your technical situation is, how it could be explained to be as it is and what to do to repair things. I try to understand what I see. I try to suggest you how you got in the situation I see, so you can confirm, deny or suggest a similar scenario. Like I suggested “multi-boot” and then that inspired you to explain “restore from a different system” (and I can provide you other scenarios in the same category).

But when every technical explanation/question/suggestion from my side is interpreted by you as criticism/insult/more of that kind, then we have no base of understanding. And I will not spoil my time on such a conversation.

Wishing success,

7

On Tue, 08 Aug 2017 14:26:02 +0000, GooeyGirl wrote:

> I’m unsure why you seem fixated / critical on / of my BiT Restore. I did
> NOT restore my previous distro’s root system settings, i restored my
> -data-, ie, my spreadsheets, my pdfs, my documents, my browser settings,
> music, videos, Thunderbird data etc. Also the personalisation settings
> for my favourite pgms, I emphatically did NOT restore any of the KDE
> Plasma system settings from my previous distro, as i know from painful
> learning last year how many problems that can cause.

I run into this kind of crud all the time. What you have to keep in mind
when restoring data that was stored/archived on a system other than the
restore target is that virtual backup/restore method (especially using
straight copies) preserves the ORIGINAL ownership and permissions for
each file - as a numeric value in the metadata, not a name. These pieces
of metadata are kept as numeric values which are not the same for all
systems so restore/direct copies may contain ids that your current system
has either incorrect or no knowledge of the original translation. I’ve
had all sorts of grief with this, especially for database files.

8

Simple set groups and ownership to something that is used on the new OS. What you had on the old system is no longer relevant and must be changed to confirm to the expectation of the new system. Generally this must be done as root . Copying from one system to another is not always simple since things are setup differently on different distros.

9

Just to jump in here - I don’t think Henk meant to come across as
assigning blame or belittling anyone here - sometimes people who don’t
natively speak English come across as being more terse/forthright/
aggressive than intended.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that, even with people you know well
(guilty myself on a number of occasions) because their use of English is
good enough to come across as being a native speaker.

On to the issue at hand…

If something changed the /etc/group file in an unexpected way, this could
be an issue - whatever it was that caused that, it would be good to try
to identify what that was.

From a group ownership standpoint, in the home directory the solution is
easy enough - just:

chown -R .users *

or similar from the home directory should suffice.

But for other parts of the system, if the group ownership is incorrect,
that could lead to other issues.

Jim

–
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C

10

Hi & thank you. I think i do understand your meaning, & it makes much sense to me with respect to my notes from & recollection of my initial oS TW installations… May for Lappy & July for Tower. The actual TW installations themselves went pretty smoothly, but afterwards the process of restoring all my backed-up personal data from my BackInTime archives [done immediately before the OS migration], was “tricky”. Before TW i used Maui Linux, & before that Mint KDE4. Both of them do not place individual users into a “users” group, but instead create a dedicated group having the same name as the userID, eg, back then my user “rachel” was in & the sole member of] a group called “rachel”, etc. Because for four years that arrangement was what i was accustomed to, until installing openSUSE TW i had no idea that some distros do it differently. Hence, my initial attempts to restore my backed-up data into TW were complicated by my discovery of this groups disagreement. I recall that at the time it caused me a lot of confusion & stress about what i should do, until i gave myself a slap & said to myself “ok, forget about how it was, just accept how TW wants it to be”. Then, with that new mindset, i was quite pleased to discover that BiT’s Restore function automagically reassigned all my restored files with group membership of “users”.

I thought i had occasionally checked the status of my groups since my original TW installations, so i was very surprised when i stumbled across the current status per my initial post in this thread.

Following my reading of your advice i have this question: Linux users obviously do sometimes jump distros, & do want to restore / retain / reuse their personal data [not… NOT… previous [i]system files]… so what is the “right” / best / safe way to do this re avoiding all ownership, group & permissions hassles?

11

I do appreciate your attempts to help me, & i regret that somehow there seems to be friction between us. Ik wens je het beste Henk.

12

Hi & thanks. Yes, i accept this & agree with your advice, hence my ongoing question that i asked at the end of my first post; is this what i should now do?..


gooeygirl@linux-Tower:/home> ***sudo chown -R gooeygirl:users gooeygirl
***

Henk made the excellent point that:

The chown only makes the GID he owning GID of the files. It does NOT “return users to group users”.

I e.g. doubt that users is the primary group for gooeygirl, because gooeygirl is added to users:x:100 as an extra group

As other info i’ve already posted herein shows:

gooeygirl@linux-Tower:~> grep gooeygirl /etc/passwd
gooeygirl:x:1000:**100**:gooeygirl:/home/gooeygirl:/bin/bash


gooeygirl@linux-Tower:~> grep rachel /etc/passwd
rachel:x:1001:**100**:Rachel:/home/rachel:/bin/bash

my users are still in “users” as their primary group… i now suspect that the spurious “users:x:100:gooeygirl” entry revealed by “cat /etc/group” might be a legacy of an error i made back after original installation then data restore when i was still confused about the different [to what i was used to] groups status.

I hope that i am on the right track?

13

Yes, that reads like progress. :slight_smile:

14

I am grateful for your athleticism here Jim lol!

If something changed the /etc/group file in an unexpected way, this could
be an issue - whatever it was that caused that, it would be good to try
to identify what that was.

I do take your & Henk’s] warning here seriously, but i can recall that this was a floundering manual edit = error] i made back on the night of installation, before i decided to accept “doing it the oS way” rather than trying to foolishly perpetuate the Mint/Maui way for groups to which i’d been used. Consequently tonight, having read all the new replies, & made my own replies, i’ve now used YaST2 to eliminate that spurious final entry:


gooeygirl@linux-Tower:~> cat /etc/group
at:x:25:
audio:x:489:pulse
avahi:x:477:
bin:x:1:daemon
brlapi:x:493:
cdrom:x:488:
colord:x:480:
daemon:x:2:
dialout:x:16:
disk:x:487:
ftp:x:49:
gdm:x:471:
input:x:486:
kmem:x:491:
lightdm:x:474:
lock:x:490:
lp:x:7:
mail:x:12:postfix
maildrop:x:59:postfix
man:x:62:
messagebus:x:499:
mysql:x:494:
nm-openconnect:x:472:
nm-openvpn:x:473:
nobody:x:65533:
nogroup:x:65534:nobody
nscd:x:495:
ntadmin:x:71:
ntp:x:483:
polkitd:x:496:
postfix:x:51:
pulse:x:479:
pulse-access:x:478:
root:x:0:                                                                                                                                                        
rtkit:x:482:                                                                                                                                                     
scard:x:481:                                                                                                                                                     
sddm:x:475:                                                                                                                                                      
shadow:x:15:                                                                                                                                                     
sshd:x:498:                                                                                                                                                      
sys:x:3:                                                                                                                                                         
tape:x:497:
tftp:x:484:dnsmasq,tftp
tty:x:5:
utmp:x:22:
vboxusers:x:470:rachel,gooeygirl
video:x:485:gdm
wheel:x:492:rachel,gooeygirl
winbind:x:476:
www:x:8:
srvGeoClue:x:994:
systemd-coredump:x:997:
systemd-journal:x:999:
systemd-network:x:998:
systemd-timesync:x:996:
trusted:x:995:
**users:x:100**:
gooeygirl@linux-Tower:~>

Please note that for now i’ve deliberately left those wheel entries alone, as i need to do some more testing… rightly or wrongly i had made that edit to get my VMs’ Shared Folders to work correctly [before i’d done that, back on Installation Night, when in my VMs i used Dolphin to access my [i]Shared Folders, i could see the folders, but they falsely displayed as being completely empty. However now re-reading my notes from that night i see i actually made two changes at once, hence it’s possible / likely that it was the other change that fixed the problem. I wish to now separate the two changes so i can conclude specifically which of those two changes was the solution. If not wheel, then i’ll remove that group membership for my users].

How does:

***chown -R .users ****

compare to:

gooeygirl@linux-Tower:/home> ***sudo chown -R gooeygirl:users gooeygirl***

please, with respect to the best command for me to now issue?

15

The first will recursively change all files and directories recursively from the PWD (present working directory). The second example does the same recursively for a directory? named gooeygirl.

16

Thank you. That’s what i thought, but wanted to check first.

17

Before:

gooeygirl@linux-Tower:/home> **ls -l
**total 8
drwxr-xr-x 17 rachel  users 4096 Jul 22 23:54 rachel
drwx------ 58 gooeygirl  1002 4096 Aug  9 19:00 gooeygirl

After:

gooeygirl@linux-Tower:/home> **sudo chown -R .users ***
[sudo] password for root: 




gooeygirl@linux-Tower:/home> **ls -l**
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 17 rachel  users 4096 Jul 22 23:54 rachel
drwx------ 58 gooeygirl users 4096 Aug  9 19:00 gooeygirl




gooeygirl@linux-Tower:/home> **cd /home/gooeygirl**
gooeygirl@linux-Tower:~> **ls -l**
total 10708
drwxrwxr-x 2 gooeygirl users     4096 Aug  5 17:27 bin
drwxr-xr-x 2 gooeygirl users      274 Aug  5 17:26 Desktop
drwxr-xr-x 9 gooeygirl users     4096 Jul 11 13:57 Documents
drwxr-xr-x 5 gooeygirl users     4096 Aug  1 18:40 Downloads
-rw------- 1 root    users 10940468 Jul 25 20:21 –force
drwxr-xr-x 2 gooeygirl users       22 Apr 12 21:54 Music
drwxr-xr-x 3 gooeygirl users      208 Jul 24 10:26 Pictures
drwxr-xr-x 2 gooeygirl users        6 Jul 22 21:48 Public
drwxr-xr-x 2 gooeygirl users       24 Jul 22 21:46 public_html
drwxrwxr-x 4 gooeygirl users     4096 Aug  5 23:52 temp
drwxr-xr-x 2 gooeygirl users        6 Jul 22 21:48 Templates
drwxr-xr-x 2 gooeygirl users      209 Jul 14 14:03 Videos
drwxrwxr-x 8 gooeygirl users     4096 Aug  8 16:46 VM Share Folder
gooeygirl@linux-Tower:~>

Does that all look right now please?
What is this?

-rw------- 1 root    users 10940468 Jul 25 20:21 –force
18

Does that all look right now please?

Looks ok to me.

What is this?

-rw------- 1 root    users 10940468 Jul 25 20:21 –force

A file named ‘-force’ with ownership root:users. :slight_smile:

You could find out what kind of file it is with

sudo file -force

and if desired change ownership with

sudo chown gooeygirl:users -force
19

Looks like others have this under control, so I’ll bow out for now. :slight_smile:

On Wed, 09 Aug 2017 09:46:01 +0000, GooeyGirl wrote:

> I am grateful for your athleticism here Jim lol!

But I wanted to just say that this is probably the first time anyone’s
ever “accused” me of athleticism. :wink:

(Which mean’s it’s time for my walk)

–
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C

20

Thank you kindly! That file was not created by me, & i’d never noticed it before. It seems to have appeared only recently, & i have no idea how/why. I backed up all my data, deleted that file, rebooted [successfully, nothing broke with that file gone], & all seems to be good.