Problem with permissions

[amador]

I have a dualboot Windows98-Debian Etch. Each OS is in its own partition, and I have a larger VFAT partition for shared data. I am the only user of this partition, so there is no need for root to be the owner of the data partition.

I cannot find a way to change permissions to read/write in the VFAT partition.

I have tried:

#chown user /media/hda7

But I am not allowed to make the change.

I have tried changing /etc/fstab from

/dev/hda7 /media/hda7 vfat defaults 0 0

to

/dev/hda7 /media/hda7 vfat users 0 0

or to

/dev/hda7 /media/hda7 vfat ro, root, users, umask=0002 0 0

or

/dev/hda7 /media/hda7 vfat ro, root, users, umask=0000 0 0


I have also tried logging into gnome as root, and not even as root I am allowed to make changes!

Please, somebody tell me where I'm going wrong.

[Zelmo]

Forgive my ignorance, but I'm not seeing a 'root' option in the man page for 'mount'. I do see a 'root=' option, which lets you specify the block where the filesystem starts, but that doesn't look like what you're using. What does 'root' do in the list of options?

Aside from that, your last two entries (minus the 'root' and 'ro' options) are what have worked for me in the past. On those, it's probably the 'ro' that's keeping you from being able to write to the filesystem.

Then again, I see no reason that root shouldn't be able to write to the vfat when using this fstab line:

/dev/hda7 /media/hda7 vfat users 0 0

If nothing else works, the best solution might be to back up everything on that drive and format it with ext2. You can get a driver to let Windows read/write ext2, and that also gets rid of some shortcomings of vfat (such as the 4GB file size limit).

[amador]

I don't see why that line should not allow me to write on the vfat partition, but this is what happens. I've tried it again, restarted the system... No workee.

Any ideas, please?

[amador]

I changed the fstab line to:

/dev/hda7 /media/hda7 vfat rw,user,auto,umask=000 0 0

Now it seems to be working. Of course, the catch is, I suppose, that everybody that logs in to my network can access the files in that drive.

Perhaps changing to:

/dev/hda7 /media/hda7 vfat rw,user,auto,uid=myusername 0 0

Should do it better? I'm afraid of screwing up.

I feel like the monkeys before the totem in "2001"

[Zelmo]

A combination of uid (or gid) and a umask that limits access to the appropriate user/group should give you the security you want.