Luciano Miguel Ferreira Rocha wrote:
On Sun, May 09, 2004 at 08:21:43AM -0500, Jeff Vian wrote:Ownership is stored on the system as numeris and is part of the inode data..
I think you are confusing /restore/ with /use/. It can be /restored/ using any system. The ownership is numeric and does not change on a differnent system.
No, I'm not confusing it, and no, the ownership isn't numeric. At least,
in my experience. I've created backups of redhat and fedora installs, in
single user mode, and restore them under live cds (knoppix or self-made).
If I didn't use the option I described, some files would end with
different numeric ids than they should. In particular, the knoppix cd has
different values for cups and other system accounts, and when restoring
the files would use those values.
When displayed by ls or similar utilities it uses the values in the passwd and group files to provide names for the user to see in the listing. The chown command also translates the text user name to his UID befroe assigining it to the file. The find command has an option to search for files with the numeric UID or name.
To check this you can simply do a chown on a file and assign it a numeric owner and group id that has no matching user/group id in the passwd file. then do an ls -l on that file and you will see the owner and group listed with the /numeric/ userid and group you assigned. In the example below I did just the opposite: I took an existing user account and changed his numeric UID in /etc/passwd.
The assigned numeric userid for a file restore from a tar file does not change, However, the displayed (and effective) owner may change if there is a user on the system with the same uid and a different user name.
I also have tested this when removing user accounts, without removing the home directory. The owner column in the display from the ls -l output becomes numeric as soon as the matching user entry in passwd is removed.
Below is an example.
----------This was done with the userid in /etc/passwd-----------------
# ls -al total 40 drwx------ 3 dennis dennis 4096 Dec 5 2002 . drwxr-xr-x 11 root root 4096 Feb 24 17:15 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 dennis dennis 24 Dec 5 2002 .bash_logout -rw-r--r-- 1 dennis dennis 191 Dec 5 2002 .bash_profile -rw-r--r-- 1 dennis dennis 124 Dec 5 2002 .bashrc -rw-r--r-- 1 dennis dennis 5531 Dec 5 2002 .canna -rw-r--r-- 1 dennis dennis 854 Dec 5 2002 .emacs -rw-r--r-- 1 dennis dennis 120 Dec 5 2002 .gtkrc drwxr-xr-x 3 dennis dennis 4096 Dec 5 2002 .kde
----------this is what is displayed after I changed the numerid UID for this user in passwd ----------
Note, there is now no user with UID of 501, and no changes were made except in passwd..
# ls -al total 40 drwx------ 3 501 dennis 4096 Dec 5 2002 . drwxr-xr-x 11 root root 4096 Feb 24 17:15 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 501 dennis 24 Dec 5 2002 .bash_logout -rw-r--r-- 1 501 dennis 191 Dec 5 2002 .bash_profile -rw-r--r-- 1 501 dennis 124 Dec 5 2002 .bashrc -rw-r--r-- 1 501 dennis 5531 Dec 5 2002 .canna -rw-r--r-- 1 501 dennis 854 Dec 5 2002 .emacs -rw-r--r-- 1 501 dennis 120 Dec 5 2002 .gtkrc drwxr-xr-x 3 501 dennis 4096 Dec 5 2002 .kde
When booting the restored system, those files would have invalidThe invalid owner/group is a result of the mismatch between the UID and GID on the originating system and on the destination system.
owners/group.
tar writes the raw data. It does not have any idea of the names associated with the numeric UID on the file.
The user ids are a problem if /used/ on a system where the group and passwd files define different userids for the owners.
Not as such. As tar uncompresses using user and group names (in _my_
experience), the extracted files will be usable by the users on that
system.
The link between the numeric values on the file and the names they are associated with is provided by the system and use of /etc/group and /etc/passwd.
I had to get this straight definitively when I merged user accounts from 2 different ISPs that had many overlapping UID and GID numbers, with the names mismatched between the sites. It took a lot of planning and creation of custom perl scripts to merge the accounts..Of course, if you consider the "use" of such backup as above, then it still is a problem.
Regards, Luciano Rocha
