New user can't access their home

Question

So I'm adding a new user on a machine to give a family member some remote storage. After setting up their login and home directory. Here's the stat

  File: `/home/heather'
  Size: 4096        Blocks: 8          IO Block: 4096   directory
Device: 831h/2097d  Inode: 89128961    Links: 3
Access: (0755/drwxr-xr-x)  Uid: ( 1002/ heather)   Gid: ( 1004/ heather)
Access: 2014-09-09 17:57:37.059406231 -0400
Modify: 2014-09-09 17:37:32.449432887 -0400
Change: 2014-09-09 17:57:22.939336208 -0400

But they are not able to access it from either local or ssh

$ echo ~
/home/heather
$ cd ~
bash: cd: /home/heather: Permission denied

Unless I'm missing something big, the permissions seem fine.

Please note I've only ever run single-user setups before, I can't find anything similar to this after a good 20 minutes of searching, please don't crucify me if I've overlooked something simple.

Login: heather Name: Directory: /home/heather Shell: /bin/bash Last login Tue Sep 9 18:45 (EDT) on pts/10 from [snip] No mail. No Plan. — user2085282, Sep 09 '14 at 23:15
I believe the execute permission might not be set which is causing the issue. So probably, do a chmod -R 755 /home/heather as a root user and then try again. — Ramesh, Sep 09 '14 at 23:18
sorry for delay, permission of /home are Access: (0700/drwx------) Uid: ( 1000/ andrew) Gid: ( 1000/ andrew), i think this is the issue, not sure how best to fix — user2085282, Sep 09 '14 at 23:22
Wow, i'm really off my game today, how didn't i think of that. thanks. — user2085282, Sep 09 '14 at 23:55

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:36

1

Run chmod 755 /home and this should be fixed. Gilles answer here is worth looking at for a full explanation of this.

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:36

Community

1

answered Sep 10 '14 at 05:04

Warwick

1,620

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 10 '14 at 04:11

UNIX knows effective users/group with uid/gui not name. So check id and gid of your home directory.

   stat --printf=%u /home/heather  #####print uid of your home dir 
   stat --printf=%g /home/heather  #####print gid of your home dir

Then check with /etc/passwd and /etc/group :

egrep heather /etc/passwd
egrep heather /etc/groups

New user can't access their home

2 Answers2

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