Problems moving from Redhat to Gentoo

lotas

Ok. Im after moving from Redhat to gentoo and im having problems with my /home directory. Its a 20gb partition and i have had it under redhat and mandrake for about 8 months now, and it has a lot of email under evolution, a couple gig of mp3s :lol:

and 2 VMware virtual machines, not to mention the mozilla cookies and cache, and accumulated source code. anyway, i moved to gentoo and told it to mount the partition under /home but i cant add users and it doesent seem to like me loggin in as lotas under gnome or kde. KDE cant make "inter process communications" and gnome dies in less then 10 seconds. :roll:

I was told about the redhat using user ides of 500+ and gentoo being 1000+ and i chowned the lotas dir to 1000 and also chgrp to 100 (may be wrong). can anyone help? i may have totally messed it up with ownership etc, but can anyone tell me what to do? Thanks and sorry for messing if i realy messed it up! :oops:

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Lotas T Smartman
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arkane · l33t Joined: 30 Apr 2002 Posts: 918 Location: Phoenix, AZ

Naan Yaar · Bodhisattva Joined: 27 Jun 2002 Posts: 1549

I actually share my home partition between two Redhat installs (only one active) and my gentoo box. I mount /home as a separate partition. I also make sure that /etc/passwd, /etc/group and /etc/shadow for users whom I want to share is the same on both systems (only for those users). I haven't had any problems with this setup for quite a while.

Note that I edited /etc/passwd, /etc/group and /etc/shadow "by hand" to do this and did not use adduser, etc. (too much of a pain).

arkane · l33t Joined: 30 Apr 2002 Posts: 918 Location: Phoenix, AZ

Naan Yaar · Bodhisattva Joined: 27 Jun 2002 Posts: 1549

More details:

Current Gentoo box:
RedHat 7.2: /, /usr, /usr/local, /home (NFS: shared), swap (shared)
Gentoo: /, /home (NFS: shared), swap (shared)

/home is served from a different box detailed below. I used to alternate for a while between RH and Gentoo until I was convinced that Gentoo was right for me

I don't use RH on this any more.

The other box is RH 6.2 that has /home (NFS: server), swap, ... I don't use GUI apps on this any more.

There have been no real issues with kde. Gnome 1.4 was OK. 2.0 seemed to have some issues with gconf... I don't use it much, so I didn't bother to investigate. Could have been NFS-related.

lotas · Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2002 12:38 am Post subject:

Thanks for the ideas. The first reply worked perfectly!! i originally had to be loged in as root, not im loged in as loas!

As a reply to the others about the NFS partitions, i would love to try something like that because i have a server here running, but unfortunitly i have not got enough space on it to run properly. I would need at least 20gb + to run all my files. it would be handy especially if i got me a laptop or used a different system to my workstation.
Thanks for all replys!!!
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Lotas T Smartman
www.lotas-smartman.net
www.the-hairy-one.com
www.lsn-blog.tk
Dual Athlon 2Gz, 1Gb ram, 120Gb hdd, GeForce FX5200, DVD+R/-R/+RW/-RW, CDR/RW

JHuizingh · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 05 Jul 2002 Posts: 100

Both of the suggested solutions should work.

Permissions work by associating the file with a specific User Number (not name). Same for Group. For example if I have redhat and gentoo sharing the same home directory for user jh, and jh UID = 507 in redhat and jh UID = 1015 in gentoo, we have a problem because only the jh in the first distro, redhat, can access the jh home directory.

Arkane's way works by assigning the home directory to 1015 so the gentoo jh will be able to use that directory. This doesn't cause a problem because red hat is no longer in use.

Naan Yaar's way works by synchronizing the UID's and GID's between the 2 distros in the password and group files. If I made both UID's 507 and gave them the same group number as well, both jh's could access the home directory because the permission is set to their UID.

rac · Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2002 4:39 am Post subject:

Naan Yaar · Bodhisattva Joined: 27 Jun 2002 Posts: 1549

Well, cutting and pasting 10 lines all at once from passwd, group and shadow is a lot easier than doing useradd with the right uid, gid 10 times. There is also cutting and pasting of encrypted passwords to the command line, etc. I find this error prone (YMMV).

lotas · Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2002 1:13 pm Post subject:

well because this system is my development system and workstation, there is only one account. so the chown lotas:users on /home worked grand!!

no one else has access to my system other then me! thanks for all replys.
_________________
Lotas T Smartman
www.lotas-smartman.net
www.the-hairy-one.com
www.lsn-blog.tk
Dual Athlon 2Gz, 1Gb ram, 120Gb hdd, GeForce FX5200, DVD+R/-R/+RW/-RW, CDR/RW