I have been playing around with chmod, chown, setfacl and special bits trying to get multiple system/full users in same group correct access permissions to my media collection.

But I’ve messed it up somehow and now I’m having weird problems that are hard to track.

I would like to set my whole collection back to the defaults.

What is the best way to do this?

One problem I’ve had when making changes to so many files is the process seems to go forever without completing. Eventually it gets killed so my filesystem has variable attributes throughout. how can this be worked around?

I want everything to be owned by myuser, group media, everything else default I will sort it from there once I have a fresh slate.

And is there a way to backup these attributes only? I don’t have enough storage to backup the files themselves.

It is Debian with ext4 filesystem.

Edit to add: Media collection is on its own separate drive/filesystem; this has no impact on anything else on the computer.

  • layzerjeyt@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
    1·
    17 hours ago

    I think the main issue was that various applications that are involved have their own user account, but you put all those users in the media group so they are all supposed to be able to access each others files. But when they would create a new file, it never gets chowned to :media, it is only owned by the group of the creating system user. I was trying to manage it so that all files owned by user jellyfin would also be modifiable by myuser.

    I wanted this to be managed correctly by the file system or something but maybe once I can get a fresh slate, just make a script that constantly runs to chown -R :media might be more straightforward.

    • Andrzej3K [none/use name]@hexbear.net
      3·
      14 hours ago

      Don’t do that. I’ve done worse, but that’s no excuse. You need to use the setgid bit (chmod g+s) of the parent folder and then look into the umask config option for whichever of your applications are creating files/directories… and what umask even is ofc lol

      • layzerjeyt@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
        2·
        14 hours ago

        I did try to setgid thing but maybe it made things worse and not better.

        what umask even is ofc lol

        my conclusion also… I did kind of get to the understanding that the correct way to do this is with umask but everytime I think “I’m just going to sit down and learn about umask” I immediately am forced to admit defeat and give up. Which is why I didn’t make a post about solving the original problem, rather just to try to dig out my current hole first.

        • Andrzej3K [none/use name]@hexbear.net
          1·
          4 hours ago

          It’s not that difficult, and you don’t need to become an expert — just find out what you need to achieve what you’d trying to do rn. Tbh I still use online calculators for permissions a lot of the time. Maybe see what you can find in the servarr wiki on the subject?