[ale] shifting permissions

[JK]

Sean Kilpatrick wrote:

>On Tuesday 04 April 2006 16:32, Sean Kilpatrick wrote:
>| Ah, yes. Now I remember; I have an icon on the Desktop labeled
>| "Widget" which runs the command "openProfile filemanagement 
>| file:///media/widget" This icon actually represents a "Desktop
>| Config File."
>
>
>Turns out this is incorrect. With the Thumb Drive removed from the
>computer, the directory /media/widget shows two files. Oops!
>
>So I tried again. Once again I inserted the Thumb Drive in the USB port
>and tried to mount it as root:
>
>| mount /dev/sdb1 /media/widget
>
>
>That works and the USB device is mounted.
>
>As root I can copy files to the device.
>
>When NOT root, I can access it if root has mounted it, but the perms on
>the files I copied over have been changed to "root  root."
>Even odder, as root I can not chown the copied files. I am told:
>Operation not permitted."
>
>  
>
That's because VFAT does not support ownership data for files (at least,
not in a way that Linux deals with -- I think security info for individual
files is hidden away in the registry somewhere, on Windows).

To be able to mount the device as a regular user, you need (IIRC) the
"user" option in /etc/fstab for the device. The uid and gid options
specify the user and group that the files will appear to be owned
by, and you cannot change that.

FYI, "man fstab" and "man mount" explain all of this.

Cheers,

-- JK

>I supose I could reformat the thing as ext3 and that would solve
>at least part of this problem, but then I wouldn't be able to use
>the Thumb Drive to transfer large files to my brother's computer,
>which is a Winbloze box. He's on dialup so attaching large files to
>emails is out of the question.
>
>There has _got_ to be a solution to this. I just don't know what it is.
>
>Perhaps I need to rewrite the line in /etc/fstab.  It now reads this way:
>
>
>Sean/dev/sdb1	/media/widget	vfat	noauto,owner,nodev,gid-users,
>uid-nobody,quiet,umask=2 0 0 
>
>
>
>Advice and counseling for this FC3 system would be appreciated.
>
>
>Sean
>
>  
>
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>
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