Problems with permissions

[jimmy9pints1]

Hi, this problem affects both my back ups and my file sharing but if I can solve it for one I am sure the other will be fine.

My laptops run Ubuntu so I was following instructions here to set up the auto (smart) backups feature. However, when I choose the backup location its gives me the red no-go sign and says:
"The selected destination is not writtable with current permissions. The backups can not be written there."

The location I selected is:
ssh://name:password@hda/var/hda/files/backups/jam-laptop
Where I have obviously changed the name and password to the name and password I use to log into the server.

Any help appreciated.

[relrobber]

the login you use for access to the server is not necessarily the login the backup program uses to perform its operations. try setting that folder's permissions to 777, and see if that fixes the error message. if it works, but you don't want to leave the folder writeable by everyone, maybe someone can tell you what user needs access to it for backup to work.

[jimmy9pints1]

OK, thanks for your help. But I am still a bit stuck...sorry I did say I am a relative noob.

Currently the output of ls -l (logged in as user jam) is:

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drwxr-xr-x 2 jam users 4096 2008-12-24 11:45 Desktop drwxr-xr-x 2 jam users 4096 2008-12-26 22:28 Documents drwxr-xr-x 2 jam users 4096 2008-12-30 20:47 Download drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8192 2009-01-06 10:08 Music drwxrwxrwx 2 jam users 4096 2008-12-26 22:28 Pictures drwxr-xr-x 2 jam users 4096 2008-12-26 22:28 Public drwxr-xr-x 2 jam users 4096 2008-12-26 22:28 Templates drwxr-xr-x 2 jam users 4096 2008-12-26 22:28 Videos

Where the directories Music and Pictures are highlighted in green. In the case of the Music folder this is because it is an NTFS disk mounted via fstab, as such:

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/dev/sdb1 /home/jam/Music ntfs-3g rw,defaults,umask=0000 0 0

And in the case of the Pictures directory it's because I have been attempting to change the permissions. For this I used commands such as:

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chmod o=rwx Pictures

This seems a bit insecure to me, but I wasn't sure how else I could give computers on the network full access to the Pictures directory.

By the way, on this client computer I have Music, Videos and Pictures (in the home folder) all mounted via fstab as this:

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//hda/Music /home/jam/Music cifs credentials=/root/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0 0

And ls -l in the home directory gives this:

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drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 2009-01-06 10:08 Music drwxrwxr-x 3 500 users 0 2008-12-24 17:46 Pictures drwxrwxr-x 2 500 users 0 2008-12-24 11:45 Videos

I have tried changing permissions from the client and can't (obviously perhaps?).

Again, any help appreciated.
Cheers, James.

[relrobber]

what about the destination directory for your backups?

[jimmy9pints1]

Well since you last post relrobber (and thank you for your ongoing help by the way) I have changed the permissions of this folder. ls -l now gives:


I changed the permission by:

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su -- chmod -R u=rw backups

I logged in as root because being logged in as user 'jam' it wouldn't let me change permissions. Now if I use the root name and password for the simple backup software on my client machine it works. But I am not very happy with this set up. Not that I know anything but it seems risky to me.

What are the security implications of this?

[cpg]

i am not following this thread in detail, however, i would suggest you avoid at all costs working as root.

change the ownership or your files in question recursively to jam:users, like this:

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chown -R jam:users backups

then try to use the jam user in the tool to login and do its thing.

HTH

[relrobber]

i agree w/ cpg that it seems that your backups folder is owned by root, and that you need to chown it to be owned by user jam.