Ssh – What are .serverauth.##### files in the home directory

fileshomesshx11

The files are .serverauth.##### where ##### is a 5-digit number.
I have a handful of these files in my home directory with a broad range of creation dates spanning a couple of years.

What are these files from? Is it safe to delete them?

Best Answer

You can remove all of them except the newest one. They are created by the startx script. If X does not shut down gracefully, that files is not removed and stays forever (see that bug).

You can change the line in the /usr/bin/startx file, to a more handy way:

Search for xserverauthfile= in the script and replace the line with:

xserverauthfile=$XAUTHORITY

Related Solutions

Linux Permissions – Recommended Permissions for User’s Home Directory and Files

To make the creation of the home directory behave differently do

useradd -m -K UMASK=0066 testuser

Giving other no access at all should be safe.

Approaches to prevent user from deleting home folder

To remove a directory, you need write permission over its parent. Which means that as long as user can't write to /home, he won't be able to remove his own directory.

$ chown root:root /home
$ chmod 0755 /home

$ chown user:user /home/user
$ chmod 0750 /home/user

With these permissions, root is the only user who can manipulate directories immediately under /home. This setup is actually very common on Linux systems, since they are multiuser ; however, I have seen Ubuntu setups in which /home belonged to the first user (usually ID 1000). While Ubuntu's first user usually is a sudoer (meaning he could delete everything using sudo), I don't think it is a good practise to give /home to anyone but root.

When it comes to chattr, I believe this would be overkill. You are facing a permissions problem, there is no need for other file attributes.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux Permissions – Recommended Permissions for User’s Home Directory and Files

Approaches to prevent user from deleting home folder

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