Hello all,

Long time back, when I was new to linux, I wanted to see which distro is
good. So I tried installed Ubuntu and Fedora on the same machine. To make my
job easy, i made a common home partition and used the same in both.

I installed Fedora first and created my user and its home in this home
partition.
Then i installed Ubuntu and created a new user with the same name as the one
in Fedora and pointed the home directory to the existing one.
Now when i logged in i got an error that my home directory was inaccesible.
So i went to failsafe terminal login and did 'ls -l' from '/home'. What i
found was that by default Fedora assigns UID & GID as 1000 for the first
user and Ubuntu assigns 500 for the same. So all i had to do was a small
edit to the /etc/passwd and /etc/groups files and change these IDs to 1000
in Ubuntu and restart.

Viola!!! I could share same settings and same desktop on both OSes.
______Sudarsan

PS: I don't recommend installing two flavours of linux and sharing same home
dir. I caused me a great deal of pain due some system level driver settings
being different.

On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 10:50, Vivek Khurana <[email protected]>wrote:

>
> Hi!
>
>  The rule of thumb in computer security world is that the physical
> access plays an important role in ensuring security of the system. If
> I can get access to hard drive I can do a lot more. The writeup you
> posted has nothing to do with Linux security, it is a filesystem level
> feature. You need not even switch users but you can mount the host
> drive and get access to data as long as you have sufficient access.
> The Linux kernel's job is to ensure no one with insufficient
> privileges can access the data and the kernel is doing its job without
> any flaw. When you login as root, you have all privileges and freedom
> to access any device attached to your system, hence you can access
> host drive too. So will you please point out how is linux insecure ?
>
>  Before posting FUD it is better to do some basic research.
>
> regards
> Vivek
>
> On Jan 21, 12:09 am, Robin Paul <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Most people in this group wud simply hate reading this, but this is true.
> No
> > matter how u set ur permissions in ur desktop linux they can be broken
> > easily with the help of a live CD.
> >
> >            I used Hardy live CD, logged in to my own comp. using it which
> > has got Hardy 8.04 in hdisk. the CD boots into Live session user which
> does
> > not give u access to the root folder of the hdisk Linux and other users.
> U
> > can bypass it easily, go to the Administration->user and groups, click
> root
> > and then on properties tab and type a desired password. Go to
> > administratore->Login Window , click on security tab and enable login of
> > administrator thru GDM. Then go to Quit-> Switch user. Type "root" as
> > username and then d pswd u had set earlier, u log in as root in a foreign
> > computer. Then u can access any part of the host computer at will. Thus I
> > use Linux to break Linux's security. Linus Torvalds has some serious
> > thinking to do!!!!!!![?].
> > Ofcourse there r obvious ways to stop a live CD. 1st set a password in
> the
> > BIOS , second is to encrypt ur hdisk. But, while the first is not a merit
> of
> > Linux the second has its own problems. If the hdisk Linux crashes due to
> > some reason it becomes very difficult to retrieve the data in the hdrive
> > using a live CD
> >
> > Dont think I am anti-Linux. This is just an experiment which I carried
> out.
> > Ubuntu is the best operating system I have ever used. And I will always
> be
> > interested in it. But this is a problem which needs to be addressed
> > therefore I have raised it.
> >
> > Do try this experiment with ur own distro and let me kno.
> >
> > Robin
> >
> > --
> > Robin Paul
> >
> > Permanent Address:
> > 1469, Poorvanchal Complex
> > J.N.U Campus
> > New Delhi - 110067
> > Phone:011-26741386
> > e-mail:[email protected] <e-mail%[email protected]> <
> e-mail%[email protected] <e-mail%[email protected]>>
> > Mobile No. - 9968047983
> >
> >  360.gif
> > < 1KViewDownload
> >
>

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