On Sun 05 Jun 2016 at 08:30:38 (-0400), Felix Miata wrote:
> Mark Fletcher composed on 2016-06-05 11:40 (UTC):
>
> >I think both these options have one potential pitfall, which is file
> >ownership after the copy over of stuff I want to salvage from the outgoing
> >HDD. If I do a fresh install, no guarantee that user IDs will be the same
> >on the new system as I of course don't remember now what order I installed
> >stuff in. My regular user ID created during install will no doubt get the
> >same ID (although even that is not guaranteed as this machine started life
> >as etch, if I remember rightly, then was upgraded to squeeze, then to
> >wheezy, and finally to Jessie). And I don't remember exactly when I
> >installed, for example, mysql in relation to other stuff. So I could have
> >some fun and games copying stuff over from the old disk to the new from
> >that perspective. Any clever ploys to deal with that?
>
> Before you start, print /etc/passwd and /etc/group. :-)
>
> When forced to create a user during installation, I create user x
> with passwd x, and the first thing I do on first boot is login as
> root and delete user x. I then install mc and do my "tidy up" before
> creating the group(s) I want and then use a script to create users,
> followed by setting users' initial passwds.
I think users and their passwords are the least of the problem.
A fresh install of jessie sets up about 30 system users before
the admin ($UID=1000) gets a look-in. So you can end up with your
email system being owned by statd.messagebus instead of
Debian-exim.Debian-exim for example.
You can diagnose the extent of the problem with a command like:
# find / -mount -not -group 0 -exec ls -ld {} \; -o -not -user 0 -exec ls -ld
{} \; | less
but fixing it is probably a matter of for ... chown ...
Cheers,
David.
