I am su root and I cannot change ownership??

[Dapper Dan]

Thanks bryansmith,

I edited /etc/fstab to include what you had down. I still can't change the ownership of lowellgrippo, no matter if as root or regular user... olishes_colt_45_acp:

[anomie]

Dapper Dan,

After making the changes I suggested, did you check to see what the ownership was already set it? You shouldn't have to change anything - it should mount with the UID/GID ownership you specified in the fstab.

[a thing]

Try changing the ownership of the directory the filesystem is mounted on recursively.

[Dapper Dan]

Dapper Dan,

After making the changes I suggested, did you check to see what the ownership was already set it? You shouldn't have to change anything - it should mount with the UID/GID ownership you specified in the fstab.

I expected to see that the files ownership had changed to dapper:users after the changes. It didn't. What I did was unmount it, made the changes, then remounted it and all files were still under root:root.

[Dapper Dan]

Try changing the ownership of the directory the filesystem is mounted on recursively.

It won't let me do that either. I went:

chown -R dapper:users /media/wd_fat_1

and every file inside comes up: Operation not permitted! :drown:

[a thing]

Try umounting the drive and changing the permission of the directory its mounted on.

/me wonders why mtab isn't in /var...

[bryansmith]

Hmmm...this is a doodle of a melon scratcher. Have you tried chmod? Give:

chmod 777 <filename>

just to see at least if you can change it this way.

Bryan

[IsaacKuo]

Why is this taking so long?

The filesystem is vfat. Vfat does not support file ownership settings; it's designed for DOS/Windows. When you use a vfat file system in *nix, all files and directories are owned by whatever userid/groupid is specified at the time of mounting (i.e. in the fstab).

You simply can't change ownership of individual files/directories with vfat.

I've never bothered changing ownership from the defaults of root:root. Putting a umask of "000" in the fstab gives full access to all users, which is all I want. If I wanted security, I wouldn't put it on vfat in the first place.

[michael56]

Right, if you want permissions/ownership on a drive shared with DOS/win, I think you need umsdos, which lets you specify gid and uid in fstab.

[Dapper Dan]

Why is this taking so long?

It wouldn't have if you'd jumped in sooner.

You simply can't change ownership of individual files/directories with vfat.

Can /etc/fstab be changed to change the ownership of all the files? Or will the ownership always be root:root?

If I wanted security, I wouldn't put it on vfat in the first place.

I detest vfat and normally would never use it. This is an experiment to see if configuration files can be accessed from Linux and Windows for the same application running under each. I'd rather not have to open the application as root.