20040810: More McIDAS trouble after changing 'ldm' and 'mcidas' users group

>From: Gilbert Sebenste <address@hidden>
>Organization: NIU
>Keywords: 200408052220.i75MKIaW005874 McIDAS LDM mcscour.sh

Gilbert,

>Bad news.
>
>The machine (weather3) was really messed up when I walked into the office 
>this morning.
>
>Permissions were wrong on everything in the /home directory. It was even 
>owned by me!

Any idea of what caused this?  It certainly wasn't the McIDAS
installation since the user 'mcidas' does not have the permission
levels necessary to change the ownership of other user's accounts.

>I still can't log in  as LDM properly, because my gnome-panel 
>settings got wiped out, and I don't know how to "start over" with a basic 
>panel so I can get things to work in that account.

You mean that you can't login "graphically"?  I just logged in as 'ldm'
with no problems, but this was from an xterm.

>Thankfully, the root 
>account seems to be OK. Any idea from your sysadmins on how to fix this?

I would say ownership of one one or more files in the 'ldm' directory
hierarchy.  I noticed that a number of the files under ~ldm had
'ldm' as the owner, but 'bin' as the group ID.  I changed this as 'root'
with:

<as 'root'>
cd /home/ldm
chown -R ldm:users *

>After two hours of borking, I decided to make users the primary group for 
>LDM and McIDAS. But, McIDAS isn't saving the data anymore. Can you check 
>and see what I cam doing wrong?

The problem was again one of 'ldm' and 'mcidas' not being in the same
group, or, more correctly, of the ownership on McIDAS executables being
still set as mcidas:ldm and not mcidas:users.  I changed this in the
same way as I did for the user 'ldm':

<as 'root'>
cd /home/mcidas
chown -R mcidas:users *

After changing the owner:group of all files in both ~mcidas and ~ldm
(and all subdirectories!), I stopped and restarted your LDM.  The
McIDAS-XCD process are once again running.

Hold on...  As I was working on weather3 I noticed that the ownership of
all files under /home/ldm would change from ldm:users to mcidas:users.
I also noticed that the ownership of all files under /home/mcidas
changed from mcidas:users to ldm:users.  Are you making changes now, or
is this some bizarre result of something run amok?

So, question is how the permissions keep getting changed?

>P.S. Try SSH'ing into weather3 directly now.

It works, thanks.  It was a real pain to have to SSH to weather2 and
then to weather/weather3.

Cheers,

Tom
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