4

I'm facing an interesting problem with plenty of Permission Denied outputs when using SymLinks

Linux: Slackware 13.1

Directory with Symlink:

root@Tower:/var/lib# ls -lah
drwxr-xr-x  8 root       root    0 2012-12-02 20:09 ./
drwxr-xr-x 15 root       root    0 2012-12-01 21:06 ../
lrwxrwxrwx  1 ntop       ntop   21 2012-12-02 20:09 ntop -> /mnt/user/media/ntop6/

Symlinked Directory:

root@Tower:/mnt/user/media# ls -lah
drwxrwx--- 1 nobody users  1.4K 2012-12-02 19:28 ./
drwxrwx--- 1 nobody users   128 2012-11-18 16:06 ../
drwxrwxrwx 1 ntop   ntop    320 2012-12-02 20:22 ntop6/

What I have done:

  • I have used chown -h ntop:ntop on the ntop directory in /var/lib
  • Just to be sure, I have chmod 777 to both directories

Permission denied actions:

root@Tower:/var/lib# sudo -u ntop mkdir /var/lib/ntop/test
mkdir: cannot create directory `/var/lib/ntop/test': Permission denied

Any ideas?

3
  • May I ask the output of "mount"?
    – user130370
    Dec 2, 2012 at 11:18
  • Thanks Eric: /dev/md1 on /mnt/user type reiserfs (rw,noatime,nodiratime,user_xattr,acl)
    – John Smith
    Dec 3, 2012 at 10:06
  • Is this because the thing that is mounted is read only? ie a DVD drive, or read-only nfs mount, etc/
    – Sirch
    Mar 10, 2015 at 14:28

1 Answer 1

4

Unless ntop is a member of users, he cannot enter /mnt/user or /mnt/user/media, as entering a directory requires +x permissions.

2
  • Thanks Dennis. But I still get the following errors: Dec 2 21:17:50 Tower ntop[13952]: WARNING INIT: Unable to create pid file (/var/lib/ntop/ntop.pid) Dec 2 21:18:00 Tower ntop[13952]: ERROR RRD: Disabled - unable to create base directory (err 13, /var/lib/ntop/rrd)
    – John Smith
    Dec 2, 2012 at 10:21
  • That has nothing to do with the above. Please include the output of namei -m /var/lib/ntop with your question.
    – adaptr
    Jan 4, 2013 at 14:17

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