permissions for /home

[RedBack]

The /home directory is currenly owned by a user. This users is no longer with the company. Who should be the owner of /home, what group should it be a part of and what should its permissions be?

Thanx.

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi:

'/home' should be owned by root. A group of 'root' is normal, too. The permissions should be 755.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Uday_S_Ankolekar]

/home is owned by root with drwxr-xr-x permission.
but you can assign ownership of a user under /home dir to a different user.
This you can do with sam.
but /home should be owned by root.

-USA..

[Bruce Troutman]

To chown just the directory do:
chown user:group /dir/path

to chown every file in the directory do:
chown user:group /dir/path/*

[John Meissner]

/home should be owned by root and the group of root. if a user owns /home then his account will have the ability to gain ownership of all files under it. maintaining root:root will prevent this.
the permissions hould be 755 - this so that root has full permissions and rx for user and group to allow them to cd into the directory

[Tim Sanko]

As a grey haired old Admin(OK! OK! balding) I would look at your applications closely. Some applications barf (Technical expression for the previously understood obscure core out ).

Several applications I know about include

Visibility: (/home needs to be grouped visib)
Katarsis: /home needs to be grouped secman )

Unless you want to run root as a member of the group, a user in this group needs to
be the owner of /home or else
these admittedly uncommon applications may have difficulty. Please check with your Application vendors to see if they have requirements. A pound of caution is worth hours of unpaid overtime. :=(

Tim