On 04/02/11 20:16, Marc Chamberlin wrote:
Thanks Anton for your reply. I can see how this was confusing, but I am trying to be thorough because I have no idea where the trouble may lie and I am NOT a Linux guru by any means. So let me try to be more precise and give an example. Keep in mind that this is a SOHO network, inside my house, and I tend to get tired of all the obtuse security measures provided by Linux that I don't need, can't understand, or want to deal with... I simply want easy to use computers that my wife in particular can understand, and me too!
That said, I use Samba to export the root directory / as a share named slash on each of our laptops. (and desktops as well) With Samba I allow guest access, make it writable and browseable.
Using autofs, I then automatically mount these exported shares on each system at
/mnt/auto/computerName/slash
This gives me complete access to the entire file system on each computer within our network, from any other computer within our network. (and I know, some people are going to groan about this, but I get so sick and tired of dealing with Linux security measures (Windoz too) that I simply give up and just tend to try and defeat it as much as I can!)
Anywise, after we have our laptops up and running, we will plug in our external USB drives, and use the KDE device notifier to mount them. They get mounted at - /media/MyPassport for example. There is nothing in our /etc/fstab that defines this mounting AFAIK, though some of what is in fstab is obtuse to me. And I have no idea why the /media directory was chosen as the place where to mount our USB drives, it was only through using grep that I was able to figure out that this was where it got mounted. The device notifier doesn't appear to tell me, like I would have expected it should. Other than what the partitioner defined, when I installed openSuSE, nothing else has been added to the fstab files.
In your reply you referred to one line in the fstab file that I also found in mine -
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
so I did some experiments, but this is somewhat obtuse to me also, so not sure if I did these right -
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto,defaults 0 0
and from what I could grok out of the man page for mounting usbfs file systems, I took the following wild guess (and various permutations)
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto,devmode=0777,busmode=0777,listmode=0777 0 0
None of which worked, So I suspect, from your description, that the UDEV rules apply (what ever those are) when these USB drives are plugged in.
Now, what I want to be able to do is something like the following, to copy files from my laptop to my wife's USB drive -
cp *.jpg /mnt/auto/wifesLaptop/slash/media/MyPassport/Documents/Pictures
or for my wife to be able to use Dolphin to simply drag and drop pictures from her laptop to my USB drive using similar paths... But as I mentioned, these operations fail, and as far as I can determine this is due to yet another layer of obscure Linux security that is setting the permissions of the USB drive, when it is mounted -
marc@marcslaptop:/media> ll total 32 drwxr-xr-x 11 marc root 32768 1969-12-31 16:00 My Passport
and my guess is that this needs to have this permission instead - drwxrwxrwx These USB drives are formatted as FAT32 so as to allow them to be used on Windoz machines as well, and that may be part of the problem, I don't know, and as I said I am guessing a lot. Linux security simply eludes me so all I can do is experiment and try... I cannot chmod the permissions of /media/MyPassport like I can for most other files/directories, and I have no idea how or why this particular default for permissions was established. (this sort of inconsistencies with Linux security is what drives me wild and is so frustrating, if I had my way I would start at the root dir and chmod everything to 0x777 and be done with it, but I found out the hard way that also breaks a lot of things! sigh... ) Hence my request for help...
I will insert some comments within the rest of your comments, (much appreciated, though I did not understand some of it) but hopefully you have enough info now so that we are on the same page... Again thanks in advance for any and all offers of help!
Marc... Does anyone know if Samba actually allows sharing across multiple filesystems? I know NFS doesn't.
Regards, Tejas -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org