[Bug 808] New: Nonexistent $HOME breaks stuff

bugzilla-daemon at bugzilla.openmoko.org bugzilla-daemon at bugzilla.openmoko.org
Sun Sep 9 04:52:56 CEST 2007


http://bugzilla.openmoko.org/cgi-bin/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=808

           Summary: Nonexistent $HOME breaks stuff
           Product: OpenMoko
           Version: 2007.2
          Platform: Neo1973
        OS/Version: Linux
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: sysinit
        AssignedTo: buglog at lists.openmoko.org
        ReportedBy: cwixon at usa.net
                CC: buglog at lists.openmoko.org


On my Neo1973 I have a MicroSD partition mounted at /home (which is analogous to
a pretty typical setup on a desktop Linux system), but the mmc device is brought
up AFTER some of the init scripts expect /home/root -- which is the default path
to the root user's HOME directory -- to already exist.  

As a result, anything spawned by init or the gui finds that HOME=/

Suggestions:

(1) Don't hardcode HOME=/home/root

I'm actually not entirely clear on the sequence of events here.

It's currently hardcoded in /etc/X11/Xinit -- oddly, as that script currently
stands, HOME is first set to /home/root, and then if that directory doesn't
exist and /root does, then HOME is set instead to /root.  But if /home/root does
not exist and /root does not exist, the value of HOME is not changed.  (It's not
clear to me whether Xinit is even run, though -- other variables set there don't
show up later.)

Also see /etc/init.d/mountall.sh -- which does sort of a manual version of the
getent | cut and attempts to make the root user's home if it doesn't exist --
though it does not use the HOME variable.  It does this _after_ the mount -a but
for whatever reason, HOME still gets set to / on my device.

In the 2007.2 rootfs, /home/root does not exist at boot, and /root does not
exist at all by default, so HOME ends up as / and various configuration files
get stored there.  It works, but it's not standard to put files there.

It would be preferable to use something like:

export HOME=`getent passwd ${USER} | cut -f6 -d:`

 . . . but getent isn't available in the default rootfs and isn't in busybox. 
And I would submit that Xinit isn't the right place for it.  Perhaps something
in /etc/init.d that runs pretty early in the process would be a better candidate.

(2) As suggested by the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, include a /root directory
in the rootfs images and use that as the default home directory for the root user.

http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html

This should go in the default rootfs /etc/passwd file so that it gets picked up
by the getent, above.

(3) Don't have the user run as root by default!

Yes, this is a known issue and I'm sure it will be rectified at some point, but
I include it here for completeness.  Running this way is the root (ahem) of all
evil.



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