Home folder invisible from other OS

Ask Fedora Ask in English
1

Edit: not a selinux issue ! I didn’t take into account that I my home is a btrfs subvolume, and thus have to mount it.

I installed MX linux on another SSD and (almost) all fedora system folders are invisible.

I added the correct selinux context (public_content_rw_t), ran getfacl and checked that the ownership and permissions were correct (755) but to no effect.

I then proceeded to fully disable selinux and remove the contexts from my home folder, but defying logic, it still remained invisible.

What is preventing users from other oses to see folders ? I searched far and wide and couldn’t find a satisfactory answer.

2

I tried running ls -lZ on /home and got this as the selinux context:

unconfined_u:object_r:user_home_dir_t:s0

If disabling SELinux didn’t help, it’s not part of the problem, so I do hope you’ve enabled it. Don’t know what the answer is, but I hope this helps.

3

I hope you did not change the selinux context of the fedora system folders. If you did it may be difficult to boot fedora in the future.

Any system running selinux can access files from another system that has selinux context if the user places their system into permissive mode sudo setenforce 0. At that point the only access permissions required are the standard linux permissions.

Be aware however, that fedora uses btrfs file systems by default for several releases now and to mount them in another system would require proper use of the mount command and the users system must support btrfs file systems.

To access a users home directory (or rather the /home tree) on a btrfs system the user must know which partition and the file system UUID to access. That can be gotten with lsblk -f.and look for the btrfs file system on the device in question.

Once the user has the proper UUID then the /home tree can be mounted with a command like
sudo mount -t btrfs -o subvol=home,compress=zstd:1 UUID=<uuid gotten from lsblk> /mnt

Of course there may be more involved if the disk is encrypted, or anything else is not standard defaults.

4

Can you clarify exactly what you mean by “invisible”? And invisible how? Do you mean from MX Linux?

Note that by default, /home on a new Fedora Workstation install[1] is a btrfs subvolume. Are you mounting that correctly?

  1. or KDE Plasma, or most of our desktop spins ↩︎

1 Like
5

Hello, thanks for the reply.

Don’t worry, in my foolish youth I have accidentally recursively changed all system permission, efficiently bricking it - haven’t done it again since then !

Any system running selinux can access files from another system that has selinux context if the user places their system into permissive mode sudo setenforce 0

Well I don’t have Selinux installed on MX and I don’t plan to install it.

I knowingly use BTRFS everywhere…

I’ll try double checking the UUID (which, from memory matched on both systems) and try to mount it with the command you specified.

6

Invisible as existent.
When on MX, Fedora’s /home is plain empty.

That’s probably the solution ! I’ll try mounting it correctly and I’ll update my post. Thanks for the reply !