[Tfug] Bizarre permissions problem

[Jim March]

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 4:34 PM, John Gruenenfelder <johng at as.arizona.edu>
wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 03:29:10PM -0700, Jim March wrote:
> >   I'm upgrading laptops and moved /home/jim to the new machine.
> >   I now have a situation where /home/jim/.gvfs is owned by "jim" but with
> >   access rights only - and root user has no permissions.
> >   So in trying to make sure I own all of /home/jim, a command like:
> >   jim at critter:/home$ sudo chown -R jim /home/jim
> >   chown: cannot access `/home/jim/.gvfs': Permission denied
> >   If I look at permissions for that directory in Nautilus, I see that I
> >   have read-only access.  If I do "sudo nautilus" to look at the
> >   situation as root, I can't even see /home/jim/.gvfs
> >   And that apparently is blocking me from resetting permissions on my
> >   home directory on a global, recursive basis.
> >   How do I gain back write-access to .gvfs?
> >   Jim
>
> Hi Jim,
>
> I've got the same directory on my laptop, though I'm not currently having
> any
> issues with it.
>
> One thing to be aware of is that this is actually a FUSE mount point.  If
> you
> run ps, you'll probably see something running like:
>   /usr/lib/gvfs//gvfs-fuse-daemon /home/jim/.gvfs
>
> If that's running, it may be affecting your ability to change permissions
> on
> the directory.  Maybe try it when you're not logged into X?
>


Answering Jude first:

---
jim at critter:~$ sudo chmod -R 666 /home/jim/.gvfs && sudo chown -R jim.jim
/home/jim/.gvfs
[sudo] password for jim:
chmod: cannot access `/home/jim/.gvfs': Permission denied
---

I could try without X yeah but...I don't think that's it.

See, what scares me is that the directory isn't visible at all when I "sudo
nautilus".  That tells me that the root account (which is there in Ubuntu
but buried) can't see the directory at all.  Root has no permissions to it
for READ let alone write.

So...if root can't read or write, and I can only read, how in God's nephew's
name can I set myself up as read/write access?

Somehow I think this catch-22 ain't going away just because I'm at a
terminal line...?

Jim
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