[Live-demo] grass data outside the home directory

[Stefan Hansen]

Thanks Hamish (and Volker),

I tried your UID solution and so far it's working, since the UID seems 
to be always 999.

It's not the most beautiful solution, but it works. :-)

cheers,
stefan

Hamish wrote:
> Stefan Hansen wrote:
>> While working on the next release of our LiveDVD, I ran
>> into a problem with grass.
>>
>> Since I wanted to get rid of all spatial data in the users
>> home directory (having lots of stuff there just increases
>> the memory requirements), I moved my datagrass folder (which
>> contains the demo data) to /usr/local/share/. Since the
>> standard user "ubuntu" is created on the fly and
>> therefore can't be the owner of files that exist before
>> his creation (at least that how I interpreted that on the
>> LiveDVD all files owned by "ubuntu", had changed
>> the owner to something weird), I changed the owner of this
>> folder, subfolders and files to "root", but gave
>> all users access and write rights.
>>
>> Unfortunately grass doesn't like that. It only wants to
>> access the data, if the owner is the user who runs grass
>> (e.g. "sudo grass" works fine).
>>
>> For now I moved datagrass back home, but now our memory
>> requirements are up to 1gig, which is not really acceptable.
>>
>> Does anyone have an idea how to solve this problem?
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> as you've found, in grass the user must be the owner of the current mapset.
> write permissions are not enough.
> 
> you can read other mapsets in the same location owned by other users, but
> not write to them (even with filesystem permissions. it was designed to be
> used by a collaborating team, with out anyone clobbering anyone else's
> work. see the help pages for the g.access and g.mapsets (with an "s") modules.
>   http://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/manuals/html64_user/general.html
> 
> 
> even if the ubuntu user is created on the fly each time, does the UID change or stay constant? maybe you could set the owner of the file to the
> number not the name..?
> 
> 
> or recompile GRASS bypassing the owner check; this is already done for
> the MS-Windows build. see G__mapset_permissions() in lib/gis/mapset_msc.c
>   http://trac.osgeo.org/grass/browser/grass/trunk/lib/gis/mapset_msc.c#L94
> shouldn't be an issue from a liveCD as inherently a single user system.
> (one would hope)
> 
> 
> 
> there are number of posts in the grass mailing list archives explaining
> how to get around it.
>   http://search.gmane.org/?query=mapset+permission&author=glynn&group=gmane.comp.gis.grass.devel&sort=date&DEFAULTOP=and&xP=Zmapset%09Zpermiss&xFILTERS=Gcomp.gis.grass.devel---A
> 
> 
> good luck,
> Hamish
> 
> 
> 
>       
> 


-- 
Stefan Hansen
Software Engineer
LISAsoft

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