Unable to login after F35 upgrade. Home directory ownership changed

I upgraded my Fedora version today and the upgrade seemed to have run through without a problem. But when I went to log in as my normal user it said password incorrect. Thinking I miss typed my password, still incorrect, then I made my password visible just to ensure I was typing it correctly, still incorrect. Luckily (unlucky) I have had experience with messing up my user password so I had a password setup for root and was able to login. Upon investigation the contents of my user home folder were owned by root:root. After a crown -R user:user /home/user and temporarily letting the user auto login without a password all seems to be working now. I am not sure what happened but wanted to start a thread if others experience the same issue.

Welcome to askfedora.

Let me guess. You are using btrfs and you did not do a backup of /home before you did the upgrade. This is not really wise with any major system changes.

I am glad that you were able to recover with a chown of your home directory.

This type misbehavior on an upgrade should be reported as a bug at bugzilla.redhat.com as it should never happen.

I actually don’t use btrfs I have had fedora on my system before butter was the default file system. I am happy I was able to figure it out as well. I’ll open a Bugzilla and reflect the problem so that we might find a fix going forward.

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This is quite surprising. I’m not sure how that could have happened, but computers do mysterious things sometimes! What method did you use to do the upgrade? (Command-line or GUI triggered?) Do you see anything interesting in the system logs? Do you have any third-party repositories enabled? Is it possible something else could have caused this?

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Here are the repos I have on my system, I have had these repos through multiple upgrades. I have also filed a bug in bugzilla

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2019834

repo id                                                                                                       repo name
Atom                                                                                                          Atom Editor
adobe-linux-x86_64                                                                                            Adobe Systems Incorporated
fedora                                                                                                        Fedora 35 - x86_64
fedora-cisco-openh264                                                                                         Fedora 35 openh264 (From Cisco) - x86_64
fedora-modular                                                                                                Fedora Modular 35 - x86_64
google-chrome                                                                                                 google-chrome
rhel8-csb                                                                                                     RHEL8 CSB packages
rpmfusion-free                                                                                                RPM Fusion for Fedora 35 - Free
rpmfusion-free-updates                                                                                        RPM Fusion for Fedora 35 - Free - Updates
rpmfusion-nonfree                                                                                             RPM Fusion for Fedora 35 - Nonfree
rpmfusion-nonfree-updates                                                                                     RPM Fusion for Fedora 35 - Nonfree - Updates
updates                                                                                                       Fedora 35 - x86_64 - Updates
updates-modular                                                                                               Fedora Modular 35 - x86_64 - Updates

Thanks! I think we’ll need logs to have any guess what happened. My leading suspect right now — and I have no idea if this is right — is that some package has a post-installation script meant to fix some permissions, and for some reason it went horribly wrong.

Understood, I have generated an sosreport for my system, just let me know where to upload them to.