On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 11:44 AM, Sudarsan Sridhar <[email protected]>wrote:

> 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.

The standard solution which i follow in this case -- "reusing /home for new
installation" is
login to root -- you will be able to do easily
*$ chown -R narendra:narendra /home/narendra*
where narendra is the user name
now logout and login as normal user ,,



> 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
>>
>>
>
> >
>


-- 
┌─────────────────────────┐
│    Narendra Sisodiya
│    R&D Engineer
│    http://narendra.techfandu.org
└─────────────────────────┘

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