/home/user/.cache permission issue in recent updates

Qubes-Whonix
1

I’ve used Remmina for a long time and have last used it about two days ago. I updated my system last night, which I do roughly once a month, and now Remmina fails and segfaults.

A log shows this:

Remmina connection profile cannot be saved, with error 4 (Failed to create file “/home/user/.cache/remmina/remmina.pref.state.VIS322”: No such file or directory)

/home/user/.cache is owned by root:root for some reason and contains a tb folder:

[workstation user ~/.cache/tb]% ls -lah
total 36K
drwxrwxr-x 5 user user 4.0K Mar  8 22:00 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4.0K Mar  8 22:01 ..
drwxrwxr-x 2 user user 4.0K Mar  8 22:00 files
drwxrwxr-x 3 user user 4.0K Mar  8 21:59 gpgtmpdir
drwxrwxr-x 2 user user 4.0K Mar  8 22:00 temp
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user   27 Mar  8 22:00 last_used_gpg_bash_lib_output_signed_on_date
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user   11 Mar  8 22:00 last_used_gpg_bash_lib_output_signed_on_unixtime
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 1.2K Mar  8 21:49 RecommendedTBBVersions
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user    7 Mar  8 22:00 tbb_version_last_downloaded_save_file

I suspect an update within the past month, installed by me last night, caused this. I haven’t done any modification between two nights ago and now that could potentially have caused this.

This is a DispVM based on Qubes-Whonix Workstation 17.
In the template, the /home/user/.cache folder is owned by user:user and empty. It appears that the permissions are changing due to some process executed when the VM starts?

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2

I think I tracked down the correct file responsible for creating the directory when starting a DispVM and it was indeed changed back and forth a bunch of times in the past weeks:

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3

As a quick fix that users can apply, use:
Permissions Fix

(Whonix is based on Kicksecure)

Will be investigated.

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4

I think I see the bug. I failed to realize that /home/user/.cache might not exist when creating the folders for Tor Browser during bootup. (Previously a sudo -u user call was being used so that the directories were created as the right user, but I changed that around to avoid the need for sudo and this happened as a result. I didn’t think to check permissions on the .cache directory when testing.)

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5

Thanks Patrick and arraybolt3.

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