How give the permission to access subfolders in /root?

Question

I need give the permission to read/write in this folder, which are subfolder of /root directory to mike.jackson (for some reason someone crete this folder inside /root) :

/root/Products/Metadata/ApplicationServers/Port8080/Marker/

Given ls -la this are the permission:

total 12
drwxrwxrwx 3 webproject_deployer users 4096 Sep  1  2010 .
drwxrwxrwx 3 webproject_deployer users 4096 Aug  4  2010 ..
drwxrwxrwx 6 webproject_deployer users 4096 Mar 15  2011 xml

So I add mike.jackson to the users group

users:x:100:mike.jackson

Still, he can't access the folder.

This is the owner settings:

webproject_deployer:x:1071:100::/home/webproject_deployer:/bin/bash

The user are authenticate by LDAP, so does mike.jackson. What should I do here ? I don't want to add mike.jackson into sudoers 'cause if I did, I can't guarantee that he won't execute a malicious command as sudo inside this folder.

Solution 1

The user needs the x permission to every folder in the hierarchy. Usually, the /root directory does not allow any user other than root to enter it, so start there and work your way down.

I suggest you move this somewhere else though, if possible. If you're not careful, data belonging to root might become public accidentally.

Solution 2

you will need to check the permission chain,

idea:
Can mike access /
Can mike access /root
Can mike access /root/Products
...
Can mike access /root/Products/Metadata/ApplicationServers/Port8080/Marker/mike

read is not necessary, but execute to traverse folder is minimum.

idea: chmod 711 to each folder on the tree