From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux


I was having real problems seeing my HP Proliant Microserver on the
network so I had a break from it and have put Linux Mint xfce on an Asus
170-P box.

Did all the same things and lo and behold I can see it on the network, I
have clearly done something wrong on the HP.

I have a 4 TB Iron wolf drive (ext4) in the HP box with my multimedia on
it, presumably all "owned" by "jeff".

If I move the drive to the Asus box do I need to chown all the data. I
know in Windows it might tell you "jeff" is the owner but actually it's
user 123456 who is actually the owner and you have to "take ownership" to access the drive if you move it between machines.

Many thanks.
--
Jeff Gaines Dorset UK
There are 10 types of people in the world, those who do binary and those
who don't.
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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux

On Tue, 17 Mar 2026 07:36:50 -0400, Jeff Gaines <jgnewsid@outlook.com> wrote:

I was having real problems seeing my HP Proliant Microserver on the
network so I had a break from it and have put Linux Mint xfce on an Asus 170-P box.

Did all the same things and lo and behold I can see it on the network, I
have clearly done something wrong on the HP.

I have a 4 TB Iron wolf drive (ext4) in the HP box with my multimedia on
it, presumably all "owned" by "jeff".

If I move the drive to the Asus box do I need to chown all the data. I
know in Windows it might tell you "jeff" is the owner but actually it's
user 123456 who is actually the owner and you have to "take ownership" to access the drive if you move it between machines.

Use the stat command to check the actual uid and gid numbers.

For example, on my current install ...
$ stat .bashrc|grep Uid
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--) Uid: ( 1000/ dave) Gid: ( 1000/ dave)
Or for the current directory (/home/dave in this case)
$ stat .|grep Uid
Access: (0750/drwxr-x---) Uid: ( 1000/ dave) Gid: ( 1000/ dave)

If you don't have sudo set up on that box, use "su -" to become root so you can run
the chown commands.

Regards, Dave Hodgins
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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux

On Tue, 3/17/2026 7:36 AM, Jeff Gaines wrote:

I was having real problems seeing my HP Proliant Microserver on the network so I had a break from it and have put Linux Mint xfce on an Asus 170-P box.

Did all the same things and lo and behold I can see it on the network, I have clearly done something wrong on the HP.

I have a 4 TB Iron wolf drive (ext4) in the HP box with my multimedia on it, presumably all "owned" by "jeff".

If I move the drive to the Asus box do I need to chown all the data. I know in Windows it might tell you "jeff" is the owner but actually it's user 123456 who is actually the owner and you have to "take ownership" to access the drive if you move it between machines.

Many thanks.

The two situations have some similarities.

Windows uses numbers. The names are secondary and
form a convenient reference for the user. Notice how
my "Mere User" is account 1000! What a coincidence.

wmic useraccount get name,sid

Name SID
Administrator S-1-5-21-3769549767-1934783099-1503750287-500
Mere User S-1-5-21-3769549767-1934783099-1503750287-1000
Guest S-1-5-21-3769549767-1934783099-1503750287-501

When a Domain Server is present in the room, all accounts
can be consistent from machine to machine. Authentication then,
is against the Domain Server.

When no Domain Server is present (a home computer room), then
each machine can be different. Notice how the number on the end
can be different "due to some assignment sequence difference".
The machine across from me has three accounts, so they can't
all be 1000. They could be 1000, 1001, 1009

Machine #1

Jeff S-1-5-21-3769549767-1934783099-1503750287-1000

Machine #2

Jeff S-1-5-21-1111111111-2222222222-222222222-1001

*******

Linux has at least some similarities to Windows. Unix has some
global resources, that I expect Linux would have an equivalent.

But at least as home users, we are familiar with "number as king".

If we plug in a foreign disk, and the owner is 9999:9999 on the file user:group, and further, the password or shadow has no entry for 9999,
then... just the number is printed as the owner. Windows does
similar. For weird foreign offerings, the SID is a number and
we can see a number or a measure of weirdness for a short time.

Windows allows adding multiple users as file ownership. This means
these two can "own" the file on my S: drive. The second one
may have been assigned automatically by the system. Or, we can
"force it" of course. The green bar in File Explorer may be present
while a person belonging to the Administrator Group, receives
an Implicit Takeown by the OS, due to the level of elevation
that user possesses. A Limited User could not coerce the situation.

S-1-5-21-3769549767-1934783099-1503750287-1000
S-1-5-21-1111111111-2222222222-222222222-1001

Linux has chown and chmod for forcing things. If you're
not the owner of a file, running elevated as the root user
by using sudo, allows twisting things as you desire.

If we saw

9999 9999 MerryChristmas.txt

we could do

sudo chown jeff:jeff MerryChristmas.txt # change 9999:9999 to 1000:1000
chmod 644 MerryChristmas.txt # Now that we own the file, sudo is not required.
# At the very least, I want a read-bit at some level.
vi MerryChristmas.txt # Usually the machines have a "vi" editor for old time sake. :q! to exit :-)

If Jeff happens to be 1000:1000 after one machine install
and 1001:1001 on another machine install, that is "foreign enough"
to be just as broken as a 9999:9999 strawman.

I'm not aware of Linux having "implicit takeown", so
you're more likely to have to intervene. The form of
the command can sometimes require a bit more cleverness,
as "whacking everything with a sledge" just is not subtle enough.

Windows has rules just like Linux, and you have to be very careful
to not be waving Takeown around from the top of C: . In a similar
fashion, "doing a Windows 98" onto your slash / tree, would be
a disaster. The /etc is supposed to be owned by root but
readable by Jeff, and we do not want to leave the permissions
too open after messing in there. Windows would not like it
either, "if the kernel was 777" for example. Windows has more than
one protection mechanism, as security overlays, to help "curve
the properties in the right direction". Linux expects
there are adults in the room, and when you make the kernel
777, "you must have done that for a reason" :-) Maybe you
learned that in your IT administrator course.

I don't pretend to know all the rules for either system.
Which is why I cannot provide a much more meaty answer
than this. Suffice to say, you may encounter situations
where a number shows up. There is an option in the
mount command, related to an account number, but this
can be part of causing a foreign file system to
"fit into the stat() scheme and have a sensible value
for a property the file system does not have (FAT32 owner)".

https://linux.die.net/man/8/mount

uid= gid=

Paul


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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux

On 17 Mar 2026 11:36:50 GMT, Jeff Gaines wrote:

If I move the drive to the Asus box do I need to chown all the data.
I know in Windows it might tell you "jeff" is the owner but actually
it's user 123456 who is actually the owner and you have to "take
ownership" to access the drive if you move it between machines.

Yes, that’s right. If you need to change ownerships across an entire directory or even the entire volume, then a simple “chown -R” command
will do the trick.

If you need more fine-grained control over which files to operate on,
but they are still too many to select one by one, there are ways to
use the “find” command to make the selection.
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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux

On 2026-03-17 21:19, Paul wrote:

Windows allows adding multiple users as file ownership. This means
these two can "own" the file on my S: drive. The second one
may have been assigned automatically by the system. Or, we can
"force it" of course. The green bar in File Explorer may be present
while a person belonging to the Administrator Group, receives
an Implicit Takeown by the OS, due to the level of elevation
that user possesses. A Limited User could not coerce the situation.

Linux can have several users "almost own" the same file. But it is an
added mechanism, not the original. It is done with ACLS.
--
Cheers, Carlos.
ES🇪🇸, EU🇪🇺;
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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux

On Tue, 17 Mar 2026 22:11:46 +0100, Carlos E.R. wrote:

Linux can have several users "almost own" the same file. But it is
an added mechanism, not the original. It is done with ACLS.

Linux ACLs cannot convey ownership privileges on anybody besides the
actual file/directory owner. All they can do is offer finer-grained
control of the usual accesses (read, write, execute) to multiple
specified users and groups.
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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux

On 17/03/2026 12.36, Jeff Gaines wrote:

I was having real problems seeing my HP Proliant Microserver on the
network so I had a break from it and have put Linux Mint xfce on an Asus 170-P box.

Did all the same things and lo and behold I can see it on the network, I have clearly done something wrong on the HP.

I have a 4 TB Iron wolf drive (ext4) in the HP box with my multimedia on
it, presumably all "owned" by "jeff".

All files are owned by an uid/gid (numeric values), then those are
matched to the user/group listed in /etc/passwd and /etc/group.

So when you create jeff on the Asus you have to see to that jeff gets
the same uid/gid as he had on the HP.

Don't forget that the directory you mount into need to have permissions
that allows jeff to access it.

If you decided to change the file owners, you can either use chown
directly, but that will change all files, which may not be the case
always, I would suggest to use find


find /mount/point -uid <the number of the HP user jeff> -exec chown
jeff:jeff {} \;

I'm assuming that the group is named jeff too, this will only change
owner of the files that are owned by jeff on the HP to the user jeff on
the Asus, but will leave all other files unchanged. This is a life saver
in case you would get the mount point wrong say for example you just set
it to root.

No you don't have to boot up the HP to see the uid, just do a ls -l it
will have a number instead of a name, as long as there isn't another
user on the Asus that has the same uid, in that case you will get their
user name and then you could use the option
-user <the HP jeff user name on the Asus>
instead of the
-uid <the number of the HP user jeff>
--
//Aho

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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux

On Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:36:27 +0100, J.O. Aho wrote:

So when you create jeff on the Asus you have to see to that jeff
gets the same uid/gid as he had on the HP.

There may be another way, if you don’t want to make a permanent change
to the owner IDs on the volume. I was looking through the mount(8) man
page <https://manpages.debian.org/mount(8)>, and discovered that a new filesystem-independent mount option has appeared at some point, called “X-mount.idmap”.
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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux

On 18/03/2026 in message <n1v2vsFloj4U1@mid.individual.net> J.O. Aho wrote:

I'm assuming that the group is named jeff too, this will only change owner >of the files that are owned by jeff on the HP to the user jeff on the
Asus, but will leave all other files unchanged. This is a life saver in
case you would get the mount point wrong say for example you just set it
to root.

Can I ask a follow up?

I use JGGROUP on my Windows network, is there any benefit/disbenefit in setting up a JGGROUP on the Linux box and putting myself in it? I don't
know its relevance (if any).
--
Jeff Gaines Dorset UK
Most people have heard of Karl Marx the philosopher but few know of his
sister Onya the Olympic runner.
Her name is still mentioned at the start of every race.
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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux

On 2026-03-18 08:43, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:

On Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:36:27 +0100, J.O. Aho wrote:

So when you create jeff on the Asus you have to see to that jeff
gets the same uid/gid as he had on the HP.

There may be another way, if you don’t want to make a permanent change
to the owner IDs on the volume. I was looking through the mount(8) man
page <https://manpages.debian.org/mount(8)>, and discovered that a new filesystem-independent mount option has appeared at some point, called “X-mount.idmap”.

Wow. :-o

I do not have all the options described in the web page, though.
--
Cheers, Carlos.
ES🇪🇸, EU🇪🇺;
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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux

On 18/03/2026 08.43, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:

On Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:36:27 +0100, J.O. Aho wrote:

So when you create jeff on the Asus you have to see to that jeff
gets the same uid/gid as he had on the HP.

There may be another way, if you don’t want to make a permanent change
to the owner IDs on the volume. I was looking through the mount(8) man
page <https://manpages.debian.org/mount(8)>, and discovered that a new filesystem-independent mount option has appeared at some point, called “X-mount.idmap”.

Yeah, but still marked as experimental and may not be available in all
distros even if the man page may mention them. I did see those in the
man page earlier this morning, but didn't mentioned them, as there is
also mounting as user/group, I think this will in the long run replace
the file system specific options to mount as special uid/gid, as not all
has this feature today.
--
//Aho
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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux

On 18/03/2026 09.44, Jeff Gaines wrote:

On 18/03/2026 in message <n1v2vsFloj4U1@mid.individual.net> J.O. Aho wrote:

I'm assuming that the group is named jeff too, this will only change
owner of the files that are owned by jeff on the HP to the user jeff
on the Asus, but will leave all other files unchanged. This is a life
saver in case you would get the mount point wrong say for example you
just set it to root.

Can I ask a follow up?

I use JGGROUP on my Windows network, is there any benefit/disbenefit in setting up a JGGROUP on  the Linux box and putting myself in it? I don't know its relevance (if any).

This more of a samba issue, but sure you may have easier discovery of
your linux shares by the ms-windows machines. As I noted in earlier
threads, I don't use samba and ms-windows nowadays supports NFS, so my
skills is quite limited on the samba stuff.
--
//Aho
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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux

On Wed, 3/18/2026 4:44 AM, Jeff Gaines wrote:

On 18/03/2026 in message <n1v2vsFloj4U1@mid.individual.net> J.O. Aho wrote:

I'm assuming that the group is named jeff too, this will only change owner of the files that are owned by jeff on the HP to the user jeff on the Asus, but will leave all other files unchanged. This is a life saver in case you would get the mount point wrong say for example you just set it to root.

Can I ask a follow up?

I use JGGROUP on my Windows network, is there any benefit/disbenefit in setting up a JGGROUP on  the Linux box and putting myself in it? I don't know its relevance (if any).

Is this your idea of a workgroup ?
The canonical value is like this.

workgroup = WORKGROUP

On Windows 7, they had HomeGroups as well as SAMBA. For
some reason, in such cases, they used

workgroup = MSHOME

but that isn't particularly clever when trying to put
everything on the same workgroup. Some of the VMs Microsoft
offered for download, were set that way, and if at first
you could not "see" them, using sysdm.cpl and editing
the workgroup, could fix it.

*******

You can try the Arch article on SAMBA, it has a few ideas.
Maybe you need Avahi running.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Samba

There are a number of nameservers. Apple uses Bonjour.
It's not necessarily the case, that a distro had no
nameserver, but maybe you don't recognize whatever
they are using.

Paul

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From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux

On 18/03/2026 in message <10petpb$4338$1@dont-email.me> Paul wrote:

On Wed, 3/18/2026 4:44 AM, Jeff Gaines wrote:

On 18/03/2026 in message <n1v2vsFloj4U1@mid.individual.net> J.O. Aho >>wrote:

I'm assuming that the group is named jeff too, this will only change owner >>>of the files that are owned by jeff on the HP to the user jeff on the >>>Asus, but will leave all other files unchanged. This is a life saver in >>>case you would get the mount point wrong say for example you just set it >>>to root.

Can I ask a follow up?

I use JGGROUP on my Windows network, is there any benefit/disbenefit in >>setting up a JGGROUP on  the Linux box and putting myself in it? I don't >>know its relevance (if any).

Is this your idea of a workgroup ?

If you mean JGGROUP then yes, I have always used that, all my computer
names begin with JG, my namespaces in Visual Studio begin with JG and my classes with J. Consistency is useful when it comes to maintenance.
--
Jeff Gaines Dorset UK
Captcha is thinking of stopping the use of pictures with traffic lights as cyclists don't know what they are.
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