$HOME not writeable error, but it is actually writable

Bug Reports
1

I’m using Fedora 37. Installation from the rpm appears to go ok (but 32 new users seems excessive). Anyway, when attempting flox activate it says $HOME is not writable. That is not the case.

[0] stahnma@giga ~> rpm -qp flox.rpm
flox-0.1.0_r339_0.0.10_r178-1.x86_64
[0] stahnma@giga ~> flox -V
Version: 0.1.0-r339-0.0.10-r178
[0] stahnma@giga ~> flox activate

ERROR: $HOME directory '/home/stahnma' not writable ... aborting

[1] stahnma@giga ~> ls -al /home
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  3 root    root     0 Feb  1 21:39 .
dr-xr-xr-x. 1 root    root   212 Feb  1 21:45 ..
drwxr-xr-x  1 stahnma users 4.7K Feb  1 21:54 stahnma
[0] stahnma@giga ~>

The one thing I can think of is that $HOME is automounted (NFS) on this setup, so perhaps the method used to check if the directory is writable is unable to account for that in some way.

[0] stahnma@giga /home> flox -vv activate
`FLOX_PREVIEW_CONFIG_DIR` not set, using "/home/stahnma/.config/flox/"
no default user nix.conf found - weird
Attempting to read own UUID from file
`FLOX_PREVIEW_FEATURES_ENV` unset or not "rust", falling back to legacy flox
Running in flox with arguments: ["-vv", "activate"]

ERROR: $HOME directory '/home/stahnma' not writable ... aborting

Adding verbosity didn’t seem to shed a light on much.

Using strace, it’s certainly getting a EACCESS issue.

12017 [pid 38833] faccessat2(AT_FDCWD, "/home/stahnma", W_OK, AT_EACCESS) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)

Note: selinux is completely disabled on this host.

Update: Moving $HOME to local disk instead of NFS automount, everything works fine, so confirming it was my hunch of /home on NFS.

2

Hi @Michael_Stahnke! Thank you for the detailed and clear report. :slight_smile: I have passed this on to our engineers to have a look.