Trouble Mounting Windows paritition

[actaea]

Security is one thing. Making it impossible for ordinary user to do simple task is another. I'm somewhat knowledgeable, but I have spent the last three hours simply trying to give the users of the two account on my machine access to the windows partition, and I still haven't been successful. I just want to be able to play the music stored there.

If I weren't fervently opposed to microsoft, I would just give up on Linux, after this experience. There is no good reason to make this so difficult for a home computer, and I doubt there is even a good security reason in general for this. As it is, I find myself unable to recommend Linux to people even though I would love to. Can't we not go overboard with pointless security details?

[techieMoe]

Security is one thing. Making it impossible for ordinary user to do simple task is another. I'm somewhat knowledgeable, but I have spent the last three hours simply trying to give the users of the two account on my machine access to the windows partition, and I still haven't been successful. I just want to be able to play the music stored there.

Can you give us more details? What type of partition is it that you're trying to share (NTFS, FAT32, NFS?), and using what protocol? (Network share, SAMBA, FTP?)

If I weren't fervently opposed to microsoft, I would just give up on Linux, after this experience. There is no good reason to make this so difficult for a home computer, and I doubt there is even a good security reason in general for this. As it is, I find myself unable to recommend Linux to people even though I would love to. Can't we not go overboard with pointless security details?

It's easy to make sweeping generalizations about how something is pointless when it's new to you and you don't fully understand it. I've done this myself many times. There are very good security reasons as to why Linux handles user and root accounts the way it does, and they date back to the days of mainframe UNIX. It's one of the things that makes Linux a lot less susceptible to attacks that plague MS Windows on a daily basis. I recommend reading up on Linux security here:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/lin...-security.html

[actaea]

I'm trying to get read-only access to NTFS files. I'm currently editing fstab to do this. This is after using the KUser GUI to give the accounts all sort of privileges and allowing every possible options of file sharing component of the KDE control center.

If you have advise on how to do this task, I suppose my arguments about why making this so difficult could wait until then. I'd rather not annoy, if you have any solutions. I can always be argumentative later.

[anomie]

Post the results of cat /etc/fstab

You'll need to add some mount options for that ntfs partition,
e.g. gid=some_group,umask=0226 (and then put all users who need access in "some_group")

or simply
umask=0222

if you'd like to make it world readable.

[anomie]

P.S. Just ask for help next time. The title of this thread is useless to someone who is querying this forum for answers.

[actaea]

Thanks,

I'm using sabayon linux, a gentoo offshoot, and I have windows on the second hard drive on my machine. This is the current line in my fstab

/dev/sdb1 /mnt/ntfs ntfs umask=0222 0 0

Do I need something besides the umask part of the line from fstab?

[anomie]

You might use umask=0222,defaults (that may be redundant, but it won't hurt anything).

Then remount the filesystem and see if it's doing what you want. If it is not doing what you want, then post the results of mount

[techieMoe]

P.S. Just ask for help next time. The title of this thread is useless to someone who is querying this forum for answers.

Changed it. Hopefully that will help the search engine.

[anomie]

Much more practical.

[actaea]

It's still not working. Here's what in /etc/mtab after relogging in:

/dev/sdb1 /mnt/ntfs ntfs rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0


I'm not sure how to remount it. I try, but the machine tells me it is already mounted.