Bug when moving between system instances

DoneSubmitted by goglosh.
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  • goglosh
  • Ludovic Courtès
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goglosh wrote on 26 Sep 2015 05:21
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Hello.I got this unexpected behaviour. I used `guix system reconfigure ...` to make a new system instance, used it for a while, and later booted back into the old system. I used diferent names for the user in the first and second system, let's call them sys1user and sys2user. I booted into the old system and tried to login as sys1user (the user created with that system) with it's password and this was no longer possible. root remained untouched, so I used root to change the password and login as usual. Done that I discovered I didn't have access to the files of user1.I then rebooted back into the new system, only to find the exact same problem. in /home/sys2user all files belonged to some user called 30011. I could of course change permissions for most of them using sudo, all but the all-important ~/.guix-profile. Since it's a symlink to a read-only filesystem, this was impossible.Thanks for listening, and, sorry about the non-technical bug report.
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Ludovic Courtès wrote on 26 Sep 2015 22:21
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goglosh@openmailbox.org skribis:
Toggle quote (8 lines)> I got this unexpected behaviour. I used `guix system reconfigure ...`> to make a new system instance, used it for a while, and later booted> back into the old system. I used diferent names for the user in the> first and second system, let's call them sys1user and sys2user. I> booted into the old system and tried to login as sys1user (the user> created with that system) with it's password and this was no longer> possible.
Yes, good point. I see how this may look confusing.
When you boot a specific generation of the system, it gets to see onlythe set of users that were declared for that generation. So one sees‘sys1user’ and ‘root’, and the other has ‘sys2user’ and ‘root’.
So when you booted the new generation, the ‘sys1user’ account wasdeleted and the ‘sys2user’ account was created. When you booted againinto the old generation, ‘sys1user’ was added back and ‘sys2user’ wasdeleted. This is on purpose, see http://bugs.gnu.org/19795.
Now, the problem is that passwords are state that is outside of GuixSD’scontrol. Passwords are stored in /etc/shadow, and removing a useraccount removes its entry in /etc/shadow. This is why you would getuninitialized passwords when booting back in the old generation.
I think this is an acceptable “limitation” of the approach though.
Toggle quote (4 lines)> I then rebooted back into the new system, only to find the exact same> problem. in /home/sys2user all files belonged to some user called> 30011.
Same issue: Unless the ‘user-account’ declaration asked for a specificuser ID via the ‘uid’ field (seehttp://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/User-Accounts.html),the UID is assigned when the account is first created.
What happens here is that maybe ‘sys2user’ got the UID 30011 at somepoint, and then got a different one.
Again, I don’t thin there’s much that GuixSD can do here, because itdoesn’t control what files are created under which UID in /home, etc.
Does that make sense?
Thanks,Ludo’.
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Ludovic Courtès wrote on 2 Nov 2015 23:56
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Ludovic Courtès wrote on 2 Nov 2015 23:57
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close 21566 0.8.3
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