[mythtv-users] Ownership problem on recordings.

[Jarod Wilson]

On Jun 29, 2009, at 12:38 PM, Larry Finger wrote:

> john blue wrote:
>>
>> Thank you for the reply, and in particular for letting me know  
>> about your SuSE 11.1 system.
>>
>> I have had the system going and have slowly been resolving various  
>> issues before I put it with the TV in the
>> loungeroom . I believe that my issues are connected with me having  
>> slave backend, rather than the main mythtv
>> FE/BE and perhaps not configuring NFS permissions correctly  
>> initially.
>>
>> I understood that  the recordings should be owned by mythtv:users  
>> to work properly.  This may have arisen by
>> me mis-interpreting what was written in various of the mythtv  
>> discussions or forums.  I had been having
>> instances of programs being recorded and files not being found.  
>> This seems to now be resolved , and may have
>> been caused by the NFS setup I had previously. I think this has  
>> been  resolved with the settings I quoted in
>> my post earlier. A few days will certainly tell.
>
> John,
>
> If you want to change the user or group under which mythbackend is
> run, you can edit /etc/sysconfig/mythbackend and change the default
> user and group.
>
> The file says that mythbackend should be run as an unprivileged user,
> but defaults to root:root.


Nb: depending on your distro's users and groups and device access  
policies, doing this can cause all internal capture cards to be  
unusable when the backend is started at boot time, because the backend  
starts before any user is logged in, and thus only root had access to  
the devices. This is true of Fedora, where devices all start out  
root:root, and when a desktop user logs in, hal/udev/whatever grants  
the user permission to use the device via ACLs (used to chown the  
devices, now its all ACL-based). Other distros have a 'video' group or  
similar, which is pre-assigned to video capture cards, and if your  
backend user is a member of that group, they should be fine. Might  
also be able to do some chown/setfacl hackage for distros w/o that.

I have yet to give enough of a damn to change my backend from simply  
running as root, which Just Works, and does NOT cause issues for  
frontends, because as someone else mentioned, the frontend doesn't  
directly delete your recordings, it sends a 'delete this' command to  
the backend, and the backend does the actual deletion.


-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com