[sclug] Sychronising User accounts across distros

[John Stumbles]

Keith Edmunds wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Jan 2005 18:32:56 +0000
> Neil Haughton <n.a.haughton at bigfoot.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>>I've edited my /etc/passwd 
>>file in one distro to make the userID match that in the other distro, 
>>but there was something about chown'ing something that I can't remember, 
> 
> 
> You need to make sure that you have the same group too, which is the fourth
> field in the /etc/passwd entry (the user id is the third field). Then make
> sure that your home directory has those permissions. The easy way, assuming
> your username is me and your groups is mygroup:
> 
> 	chown -R me.mygroup /home/me
> 
> That should do it, but if you have problems then come back here.

Without firing up my laptop I can't say for sure but IIRC Mandrake is a
RedHat derivative and has a group for each user (so user fred is in
group fred). I don't know about Debian-style distros but do they do the
normal user=fred, group=users thing? Don't know if this would inherently
make anything more complicated, but I'd expect gotchas wrt what groups
the user is a member of and what devices (e.g. CD, serial ports etc)
they have access to.

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:-)

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