Windows 8 group won't respect /etc/passwd or /etc/group

[John Smith]

Hi there,

I wanted to say thanks again for the help. With your advice I was able 
to track it down -- well, the most annoying parts, anyway.  I had an 
editor I was using that did not have all the same permissions assigned 
to it as say, Notepad or Wordpad.  The net effect is that it was somehow 
changing the group back to None every single time it saved a file.  This 
I finally solved by copying the same permissions I saw on Notepad -- 
including a special one entitled "ALL APPLICATION PACKAGES".  So now 
with that application having the above, plus SYSTEM, my account, 
Administrators, and Users, it was able to edit the file without changing 
the group or permissions as we intend.

> OTOH, I don't understand what you're trying to accomplish.  You can just
> change the name of the "none" (or "HomeUser", see below) group in
> /etc/group and be happy.  The group membership doesn't really matter on
> a non-domain standalone system anyway.

The reason I was having this issue in the first place was because the 
None user group won't allow me to change group permissions.  When 
rsyncing with a remote server, I mirror permissions from that server and 
what was happening was that I had to change my group locally to anything 
else besides None (Lots of this help online, see 
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9561759/why-cannot-chmod-in-cygwin-on-windows-8-cp 
for one such example) in order to make it accept the permissions for 
groups.  It is aggravating, but such is the way of things currently.

Perhaps there is a way to make cygwin allow the 'None' group to have 
permissions or something to get around this?  That seems somewhat 
dangerous but then again, like you said below, the "None" group really 
is a group -- so I don't know.

I'm going to mess around with changing the group name within Cygwin -- 
perhaps it's just the word "None" that causes this group permission 
problem, and not the id 513.  That seems unlikely but I am going to give 
it a shot anyway.

> I can't be sure, but it seems that Windows uses that group as primary
> group if you're using the HomeGroup sharing stuff, which I have no
> experience with.  I tried to reproduce this, but this is apparently not
> enabled on enterprise systems.  But I read a bit about it, and it
> seems to have a life on its own, for instance:

I did mess around with HomeGroup permissions and found they weren't the 
issue.  It wasn't until I changed the permissions to match what I saw on 
another system application (Notepad) that I noticed the ALL APPLICATION 
PACKAGES and the like.  I don't know if that's the particular fix, but I 
just removed all permissions and re-added them, ensuring inheritance was 
*off*, and that seemed to fix the changing group issue, anyway.

>> If that is the case, how do I make a manual entry in my /etc/group
>> for a "John" group?
>
> Don't.  That's your user account.  It doesn't belong into /etc/group.

Ultimately the other tool I used to troubleshoot was to create a new 
user locally, too.  I was trying to debug whether it was the Windows 8 
"live" account that was the issue vs a local account, and found that the 
local account worked fine (well, at least getting rid of the ???????? 
group.  After messing with that, regenerating the /etc/group and 
/etc/passwd files, a reboot, I was able to get my normal account to 
recognize "None" again.  So bizarre.  I am not sure why adding another 
user and regenerating those /group/mkpasswd files fixed the issue, but 
it seemed to.  I must have regenerated those files a dozen times over 
the course of the past week trying to solve this issue.  I wish I could 
tell someone else reading this what the right answer was, but when in 
doubt, reboot after the change.

Hopefully this helps someone else out there.  Thanks so much for your 
help, Corinna, it was vital to tracking down the issue with the 
permissions on the application itself being the issue.



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