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Altoid

Member

Registered: 2017-05-07

Posts: 1,592  

[SOLVED] Ownership/permisisons of /home/user/mbox

Hello:

Just came across this when I was doing some maintenance in a Devuan ascii 4.19.0-17-686-pae installed on an Asus 1000HE 2Gb.

groucho@eee-dev3:~$ ls -l /home/groucho/mbox
-rw------- 1 root root 5691 May 30  2019 /home/groucho/mbox
groucho@eee-dev3:~$ 

I cannot access my own mbox.  8^'

Any idea as to how this could have happened?
I belong to the groups I should belong to.

groucho@eee-dev3:~$ groups
groucho adm disk mail dialout voice cdrom floppy tape sudo audio dip backup video plugdev users crontab netdev bluetooth Debian-exim pulse pulse-access
groucho@eee-dev3:~$ 

How is it that I have to chown my own user mbox?

Thanks in advance,

A.

Altoid

Member

Registered: 2017-05-07

Posts: 1,592  

Re: [SOLVED] Ownership/permisisons of /home/user/mbox

Hello:

Any idea as to how this could have happened?
---
How is it that I have to chown my own user mbox?

I was not able to find out why this happened, which would have been nice.

But I was able to fix it without using chown.

Turns out that, for whatever reason, there were two mailboxes in /home/user/:  /.mbox and /mbox, only the first one available to my user.
But when I logged in and checked my mail, mail checked the mailbox that should have been available to my user. ie: /mbox which belonged to root.

So I just did # rm .mbox and # rm mbox, rebooted, checked my user mail and now all is as it should be.

Best,

A.

chris2be8

Member

Registered: 2018-08-11

Posts: 313  

Re: [SOLVED] Ownership/permisisons of /home/user/mbox

Check what root's home directory is (ie it's not /home/groucho). Then look in it to see what it has for it's mbox.

Did you ever switch to root via su without a -, then run mail as root? Or do something else that could make root think it's home dir is /home/groucho ?

Chris

Altoid

Member

Registered: 2017-05-07

Posts: 1,592  

Re: [SOLVED] Ownership/permisisons of /home/user/mbox

Hello:

Check what root's home directory is ...

Yes.

groucho@eee-dev3:/var/mail$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-rw---- 1 groucho mail 0 Jul  7 16:14 groucho
-rw------- 1 root    mail 0 Jul  6 22:18 root
groucho@eee-dev3:/var/mail$ 

... ever switch to root via su without a -, then run mail as root?

Ahhh ...

That could have been the culprit. ie: me.
I have that annoyance fixed in my box but not yet in the 1000HE.

Fixed now. 8^)

Thanks for the heads up.

Best,

A.