On Wed, Sep 29 2021 at 10:35:35 PM, David Wright <deb...@lionunicorn.co.uk> wrote: > On Wed 29 Sep 2021 at 16:46:14 (-0400), Greg Wooledge wrote: >> On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 07:05:37AM -0700, pe...@easthope.ca wrote: >> > From: Greg Wooledge <g...@wooledge.org> >> > Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2021 13:41:05 -0400 >> > > What does it look like? >> > > >> > > ls -ld / /var /var/log /var/log/journal >> > >> > root@joule:/# ls -ld / /var /var/log >> > drwxr-xr-x 18 peter peter 4096 Sep 27 18:00 / >> > drwxr-xr-x 11 root root 4096 Nov 3 2020 /var >> > drwxr-xr-x 10 root root 4096 Sep 29 06:39 /var/log >> >> The ownership of the / directory is wrong. It should be root:root, >> not peter:peter. >> >> chown root:root / >> >> Everything else looks OK at the moment. > > Similar to https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2021/07/msg00907.html > but even worse (there, it was only group ownership that was wrong). > It does appear that there's a subset of people who immediately > recognise this warning message as meaning "wrong ownership", > Greg (possibly), Kushal and of course Poettering: >
FWIW, that email was the first I'd ever heard of the problem. My solution was based on a web search, which probably led me to the following link, but I neglected to include that in my email. > https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/11282 > > Would it be sensible for the message to actually mention ownership, > or can it apply to very different circumstances (beyond permissions, > that is)? I've failed to find any other cause, but see a lot of > people messing up their ownership. According to the code at https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/dd4c15296cce001287d03a6647a751f253de2a51/src/basic/fs-util.c#L736, the message has been updated three months ago to include ownership of the offending directories. At this point, we'd need to wait for a newer version of systemd to migrate into debian repos. > > Is this being done by people, say, untarring archives as root, or > are there some buggy programs out there? One person claimed it > happened through formatting a partition with some gnome program. > Is that likely? > > Cheers, > David.