User directories owned by others on loading custom VM images

[Arvind Narayanan]

Hi,

I along with my project partners created an image of an existing VM and were trying to create a new slice with this image on a number of VMs.

But after the new slice was created, these new VMs had the mapping of user directories and their groups kind of messed up.

Project name: GREESC14

Slice name: Dash

Under Wisconsin aggregate resources, we have a VM. Here are its details :

Hostname: EdgeServerB.Dash.ch-geni-net.instageni.wisc.edu

Login: ssh username@pcvm1-9.instageni.wisc.edu

Note the port is 22

For this host, let me paste the directory structure..

naray111@edgeserverb:/users$ ls -l
total 48
drwxr-xr-x 3 hussamn  561 4096 Jul 23 16:24 agosain
drwxr-xr-x 3 sheha008 561 4096 Jul 23 16:24 dbhat
drwxr-xr-x 3      502 561 4096 Jul 23 16:24 geniuser
drwxr-xr-x 3 vthomas  561 4096 Jul 23 16:24 hussamn
drwxr-xr-x 3 mmnt7    561 4096 Jul 23 16:24 mmnt7
drwxr-xr-x 3 sedwards 561 4096 Jul 23 16:24 mzink
drwxr-xr-x 4 naray111 561 4096 Jul 24 23:57 naray111
drwxr-xr-x 3 mzink    561 4096 Jul 23 16:24 nriga
drwxr-xr-x 3 dbhat    561 4096 Jul 23 16:24 rizard01
drwxr-xr-x 3 rizard01 561 4096 Jul 23 16:24 sedwards
drwxr-xr-x 5 nriga    561 4096 Jul 24 11:42 sheha008
drwxr-xr-x 3 agosain  561 4096 Jul 23 16:24 vthomas
naray111@edgeserverb:/users$

Something like this is also happening with another VM which was also loaded with a custom image:  ssh username@pcvm3-24.instageni.stanford.edu

Any clue on what's going on?

Thanks!

-----------------
Arvind Narayanan
Graduate Student & Research Assistant,  Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CS&E), UMN
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (UMN)
w: cs.umn.edu/~arvind/

[Zhe Wang]

Hi Arvind,

There is some issue on this. There are 2 workarounds for now.

1) First reserve a node using your image. Delete all folders except geniuser under /users. Re-create the image. (if you use same name for the image on the same aggregate you created it, the url and id will be the same, meaning the old one is overrode) This should resolve most of the cases. If not (including new issue like connection refused), I recommend you to create your image from the very beginning and make sure delete all folders except geniuser under /users before you take the snapshot.

Or 2) you can reserve through Flack. Every folder should be owned by you.

Let us know if these don't work out for you.

Thank you

Joe

[Leigh Stoller]

> The problem below (with directory ownership on custom images) seems to
> come up quite often and was wondering if there is a solution to this.
>
> Also, is Joe's suggestion (1) actually a work around for this problem
> that we can document while looking for a better solution?

Okay, I am going to push out a new version of UBUNTU12-64-STD that has a
fix for this. Basically, we are more aggressive about deleting everything
in /users when an image is created. This new image version should be on all
racks by Friday evening.

But that does not help with existing custom images, unless you are willing
to go back to UBUNTU12-64-STD and retrace your steps. Instead, you can take
your existing custom image and install the latest Emulab clientside on it,
and then take a new snapshot image of it. To do this, boot your image and
then log in and do:

cd /var/tmp
git clone git://git-public.flux.utah.edu/emulab-devel.git
mkdir obj
cd obj
../emulab-devel.git/clientside/configure
make client
sudo make client-install

And then use your favorite client to take a new image.

Leigh