Lesson learned / file permissions
Hi
In one of my moments last night I thought, why should any of the files in
my home directory need to be world-accessible? I didn't think long about
it before I decided to remove all read, write and execute rights for
world. Before I did that, however (and thank god for that), I saved all
the existing permissions to a file:
$ find /home/username/ -xdev -printf "%m %p\n" > permissions.txt
Then:
$ sudo chmod o-rwx /home/username/*
$ sudo chmod o-rwx /home/username/.*
After that, all hell broke lose. I couldn't start any new KDE application,
existing applications complained about insufficient rights, no temporary
or session files could be written etc. I couldn't even access my home
directory after I restarted. Luckily I was able to restore all previous
file permissions with the saved file and got back into my user account
this morning. So, lesson learned. Don't mess with things you don't need
to mess with, make backups, and be less paranoid. :)
I think it was the fact that /home lost all world-permissions that caused
all the problems. Would you agree?
Secondly, by calling chmod with sudo, all the files owned by root that I
as a user needed to see were now invisible. But they don't seem to be so
many so I am wondering if that had any influence.
Should I simply leave the .* files in my home directory alone? :) I
acually found some that had 777 permissions which I didn't like. All my
documents are 750 or less and the umask is set to 027. Is that ok for
security?
Best regards
Olle Eriksson
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