Users and folders

[Артемий Александрович]

Cheers! Thank you for awesome firmware! It breathed new life to my 320L. Looking forward to new updates.

But for now I have 2 question:

1) How I can remove users from 'backup' group? I can't create such group and then delete some users from it because this group name already in use. Any users there except Time Machine bring me too much heartache.

2) How I can link some user's home folder to another directory? For example, for user 'Timmy' Alt-F create and link directory Users/Timmy, but I want to delete it and link Timmy's home folder to Users/John.

Thank you.

[João Cardoso]

On Thursday, April 16, 2015 at 10:19:43 PM UTC+1, Артемий Александрович wrote:

Cheers! Thank you for awesome firmware! It breathed new life to my 320L. Looking forward to new updates.

But for now I have 2 question:

1) How I can remove users from 'backup' group? I can't create such group and then delete some users from it because this group name already in use. Any users there except Time Machine bring me too much heartache.

The Backup Alt-F service relies on all users  belonging to the backup group, so it will probably stop working as expected if that doesn't happens. That's why the 'backup' group doesn't appears in the Setup Users webUI -- its a system group!

But if nonetheless you which to do it you have to resort to the command line:

[root@dns-320l]# id mlima # shows which groups 'mlima' belongs to

uid=1001(mlima) gid=100(users) groups=100(users),34(backup)

 

[root@dns-320l]# delgroup mlima backup # delete mlima from backup group

 

[root@dns-320l]# id mlima

uid=1001(mlima) gid=100(users) groups=100(users)

 

[root@dns-320l]# addgroup mlima backup # re-add mlima to backup group

 

2) How I can link some user's home folder to another directory? For example, for user 'Timmy' Alt-F create and link directory Users/Timmy, but I want to delete it and link Timmy's home folder to Users/John.

So you want to have a John alias called Timmy, is that it? Whenever John or Timmy login both will have the same home folder.

That can be done but is highly non-standard. The main reason is related with file permissions and ownership. If Tommy logs in and create file foo, that file will belong to him; if latter John logs in and tries to edit that file that will fail, as it doesn't owns the file. That is a simple situation -- depending on how the home folder permissions are set, one of the alias user will not even be able to login.

What you can to do is to create another folder, say Shared, belonging to the group JohnTimmy with group read/write/browse permissions, and make John and Timmy belong to that group. Then, any one of them will be able to access the Shared folder.

Read the Permissions online page (accessible through the Folders Browse webUI) and read a linux tutorial on file permissions and ownership.

If however that is not what you want, but you just want that Jimmy's home folder to be named Users/John (without a John users existing) (can't imagine why, but the need is yours), you have to edit the /etc/password file and change the corresponding entry. You might have a lot of issues, as some programs assume that a users home folder is called after its nickname.

Alt-F is non standard in that respect, it uses the user full name instead of the user nick name to name its home folder. So, 'jcard' (Joao Cardoso) home folder is not called /home/jcard but "/home/Joao Cardoso". Occasionally some programs choke with that non-conformity to the traditional unix standard -- but  there nothing in the standard that prohibits it, it's just a 45 years long convention that I decided to break -- it was about time!

 

Thank you.