# $HOME not writeable error, but it is actually writable

**URL:** https://discourse.flox.dev/t/home-not-writeable-error-but-it-is-actually-writable/634
**Category:** Bug Reports
**Tags:** closed
**Created:** [February 2, 2023, 4:10am UTC](https://discourse.flox.dev/t/home-not-writeable-error-but-it-is-actually-writable/634 "2023-02-02T04:10:07Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![Michael\_Stahnke](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex036/user_avatar/discourse.flox.dev/michael_stahnke/32/516_2.png) [@Michael\_Stahnke](https://discourse.flox.dev/u/Michael_Stahnke)
#### Post date: [February 2, 2023, 4:10am UTC](https://discourse.flox.dev/t/home-not-writeable-error-but-it-is-actually-writable/634/1 "2023-02-02T04:10:07Z")

</div>

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.

```auto
[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.

```auto
[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.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![robinbrantley](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex036/user_avatar/discourse.flox.dev/robinbrantley/32/39_2.png) [@robinbrantley](https://discourse.flox.dev/u/robinbrantley)
#### Post date: [February 2, 2023, 10:33am UTC](https://discourse.flox.dev/t/home-not-writeable-error-but-it-is-actually-writable/634/2 "2023-02-02T10:33:12Z")

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