networking & access denied

[roeiboot]

oi~

i have a network with Linux RedHat 7.1 & Windows 98.. pretty much everything works, the issue is that i copy quite alot from the 98 pc to the Linux box, like to a "users" directory, since they are "owned" by a user i often get "access denied".. how do i make myself a 'user' or "co-owner' of all those folders so i can copy without errors and/or copying to another dir first... i said it before and i will say it again the whole group 'thing' of Linux makes no sense to me...

 

[KenCunningham]

If you are able to add yourself to the same group as the user on the Linux box, and assuming the group had write access to the user's directory, you should have no problem. Presumably you don't have access to the root account as this would enable you to copy your files with no problem?

 

[roeiboot]

as i said, the whole group thing in Linux doesn't make sense to me.. been 'playing' with it for a few days now & still it's Spanish to me (note: i don't speak Spanish

 

[sonofepson]

Enter the following: ls -al /home
You will get a listing similar to this:
drwxrw---- 5 username groupname 4096 Oct 30 2002 Dirname

If the group names in the directories that you want to access are all the same (ie users) then verify that you have write access to the directories. This is done by looking at the first part of the ls commands listing (the drwxrwxrwx part) d stands for directory, r for read, w write, x for executable. They are broken into triplets of rwx for the owner, group and others. So a listing that showed dwrxwr---- would allow the owner of the directory to have read, write and execute access, the group would get read and write access, all others would have no access.
If you do not have group write access and all the group name are the same you can give the group write access by doing the following:
su (to become root)
cd /home
chmod g+rw *
This will change the permissions on all the directories in home to allow read and write access for the common group.

If the group name are all different then you can do what KenCunningham suggested by doing this:
su (to become root)
vi /etc/group

toward the bottom of the group list you will find all the user groups. The group listing will look similar to this-

bob:x:101:bob

these entries mean
groupname : x is the password placeholder : group id : users

Add yourself to each user group that showed in you directory listing for /home/. So the group entry would look something like this -
bob:x:101:bob,yourlogin

 

[krale]

Ahhh, let's get this Owner:group:everyone issue out of the way..

First, the owner is who created the file. Guess who it is ;-)
Second is the group. The best way I can explain it is as this:
You have a multi-user system where people need access to certain parts of your hardware. Some users need to use the serial port, some need to use cd-burning and dvd-viewing, yet some others want to play games and stuff.

You'll read up that you have a /dev/file system where all of your devices are acting as files. They also have the attributes like user:group

Here's a sample of what I'm talking about
/dev/sr0 (cd burner) root:cdread (perm 0770)
/dev/sr1 (dvd rom) root:dvdread (perm 0770)
/dev/ttyS0 (com 1) root:serial (perm 0730)
/dev/dri (fast graphics stuff) root:gamer (perm 0770)

Now, you have users Root, Bob, lisa, John, and guest. John needs the serial port for his development and needs to back up stuff to the cd-burner. Bob and Lisa need... no, want to play games and Lisa wants to use the DVD to watch movies. Bob also makes copies of his games. Guest cant do anything.

Well, you have:
SERIAL users: John
CDREAD users: John,Bob
DVDREAD users: Lisa
GAMER users: Bob,Lisa


You see how it looks? You can create groups to seperate what users can get to and what they cant. Users can also be in multiple groups. Hopefully, I cleared some confusion.