Linux, Change from root to regular user.

[ninjab]

I have syncthings running in a Ubuntu LXC on Proxmox, the syncthings syncs pictures from our phones to the server which shares them out locally with samba. Stupidly I set syncthings up as root and I would like to correct this.

I have several shares setup already. Is there a way to transfer all the settings to another user? I am somewhat of a linux noob as well.

I tried copying the syncthings directory from root over to the home directory for user “syncthings”.

then stopped and disabled: systemctl syncthing@root.service Then tried to systemctl enable syncthing@syncthing.service systemctl start syncthing@syncthing.service But when I check status, syncthing@syncthing.service failed to start.

I then read that copying the syncthings folder to another user might causes a bunch of sync problems so I deleted it out of the synthing users home directory.

What’s the proper way to go about this? Thanks

[calmh (Jakob Borg)]

There is nothing to stop you from doing what you attempted to do, provided that you make sure to adjust ownership of all the files (confit, database, and the synced files themselves) so syncthing can access them as the new user.

[ninjab]

Thanks, it was a permission issue. I had the syncthing user in a group that owned the directory but I did not know that the default group owner was read only. After adding write permission to the group, syncthings started and all my sync folders were intact.