Hi Piero!
On Sat, 06 May 2000, Piero wrote:
| In order to coordinate the Netscape address books in the Windows partition and
| those on the Linux partition, I erased the files corresponding to the last ones
| and substituted them with symlinks to the files existing in the Windows
| partition.
| It wasn't so smooth, but it finally worked.
| Now, in the process of doing this napoleonic manoevre, I stumbled over
| something that made me perplexed, and for which somebody has perhaps an
| explanation.
|
| All the files in the Windows partition belong to root and have mode: rwxr--r--.
| When I work under Linux I work under username piero.
|
| Since the changes in the addressbooks, that piero makes under Linux, have to be
| reflected on the Windows partition files, I logged in as root, and tried to
| change the permissions of these files (chmod o+w filename). Impossible. I
| tried the to change their ownership: impossible. I finally modified /etc/fstab,
| in such a way that piero has the ownership of all the files in the Windows
| partition (uid=piero's user number).
| This made the think work, but I do not find it satisfactory. Does anybody know
| what prevents root form changing permission or ownership of the files belonging
| to the Windows partition?
Permissions and ownership of files on a FAT/VFAT partition are determined at
mount time. The solution is (generally) to modify the umask and/or gid.
Example:
/dev/hda1 /mnt/DOS_C vfat umask=002,uid=0,gid=100,nosuid,nodev,noexec 0 0
This allows read access to everyone, and full rw access to everyone in the
group users. The noexec option is set because my Win partition exists to
support only one piece of software which requires DirectX :(.
