Permissions Problems

Norton Allen allen@huarp.harvard.edu
Mon May 16 14:13:00 GMT 2016


I have seen problems similar to those reported in "RE: Possible issue 
with newest version of git (v 2.8) under Cygwin", but I did not want to 
hijack that thread.

For me, the problems have been elusive. Scripts that used to work would 
fail as created directories had bad permissions, but I didn't have time 
to sort them out. In the last week, I finally had time to read through 
the documentation on the ntsec page and try some tests, and of course 
now I'm having trouble reproducing the problems. You'd think that was a 
good thing, right?

I had been using /etc/passwd from mkpasswd, and based on recommendations 
here, I modified nsswitch for passwd: db. This seemed to work fine, and 
I decided I was all set.

Then Windows update rebooted over the weekend, and nothing worked, and 
returning to 'files' resolved the problem.

The exacerbating factor here is that I have a laptop connected to my 
work domain, but we use cached windows credentials when we are not on 
the work LAN (like at home over the weekend). In this scenario, cygwin 
was apparently unable to determine my username, and hence was unable to 
locate my home directory. The username is apparently cached successfully 
if I reboot at work and then go offline, but not if I reboot offline.

Does this mean I need to stay with 'passwd: files db' for the 
foreseeable future, or is it possible to find the username in this scenario?



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