On 2/6/2011 4:43 AM, Anton Aylward wrote:

Marc Chamberlin said the following on 02/06/2011 12:43 AM:

...

Anton, again thanks for your replies and thoughts. I see a bunch of replies from you so will try to address each.. As for purpose, I don't think that is important, but we are creating a database of old family pictures and want to categorize them by placing in different sub-directories. (along with other documents) Think about genealogy and family trees and you will get the idea. She works on some, I work on some.... When I get done with some work, I want to move the updates onto her USB drive and this data must be placed in appropriate or new directories as needed, and v.s. for her.. And we take our drives with us to work with other family members, hence the need for portability... No, it *is* important because it is what drives your need for the USB.

I too have family photos, videos, sound recordings. I archive them to my sever and then burn them onto a CD when I want to send them (or an update) to other family members.

Certainly a file server (which could also serve as mail hub, web/wiki, many other things) is a more sensible approach to "sharing".

Using FreeNAS would soak up both your NFS and your SAMBA services, and supply a few other services. An yes it has a GUI for management.

My problem with your description is the idea that things have to be moved to the USB right away. The end use of the USB - "carry about" - is not unreasonable. Using it as a working media does not strike me as sensible for a number of reasons: speed of access, lack of uniqueness, and the fact that the media can only take so much use, its not like rotating magnetic media which can be re-written indefinitely.

The USB - or in my case the CDs - should be the END POINT of the work.

I can also see problems with you each working on 'local' copies and trying to cross update. You need on REFERENCE copy.

Changing your process will eliminate many of the problems you are creating for yourself.

Saying that manually copying to the USB is a PITA just shows you are hung up on moving the USB to an early point in the process rather than the end-point which it is.

Now I know you are going to come up with a pile of "yes, but" responses, but the trend you are displaying is what might be termed "wallowing in ignorance". You are headbutting Linux rather than the Ju-Jitsu "go with the flow", trying to beat it into submission rather than using its strengths. Your remarks about CLI/GUI illustrate this: the shell is a very powerful tool and small scripts, one liners, trigger driven actions and such are part of what Linux is and what makes it so superior to Windows. If you stay in denial about using them, if you insist that security is getting in your way rather than making you focus, then you are going to be beset by "problems" than the rest of us simply don't encounter.

In short, you are making life difficult for yourself by not 'going with the flow". Making everything world writeable, using SAMBA instead of NFS are illustrations of the technical aspect of this. Anton - I think the time has come for you and I to simply agree to disagree with each other. Like religious argumentation, I think we each have a view that does not comprehend the others. My understanding of your view is that you believe users should be forced into complying with and accomplishing their tasks in the "Linux way", which I don't think is easy to grok and narrow minded. I believe computers should be adaptable, with consistent easy to understand tools and models, that allow the user to easily adapt the tools they see and are familiar with, to new situations.

I do NOT understand the reasoning behind having an inconsistent security model that on the one hand easily allows me to set the file/directory permissions such that I can push or pull files across a network to/from internal drives, but am restricted from doing so when it comes to attached external USB drives. Conceptually, for a user, there should be no difference in the security model being used to control access to either type of drive, they simply hold a file system, and the OS has the responsibility to make the security model consistent and transparent to the user. Yes, I probably could follow your suggestions of setting up a staging process for moving files across. We could use a central repository, such as CVS, but then I face the prospect of having to teach my wife, and family members how to use it. (or any other file management system for that matter.) They understand the simple ideas behind cp and mv, drag and drop, how to navigate our network, etc along with the concept of storing data on the external USB drives. Getting my wife, or 75 year old mother to work (who uses Windoz instead, but cannot put anything directly on my USB drive either) with anything more complicated will be asking way too much of them! NOT gonna happen! I came to this mail list seeking a way to solve this permissions problem with external USB drives, in such a way that would allow all of us to continue to use the tools we all understand, while letting this model of file transfer remain transparent and consistent to them. I understand the risks of reducing security, and wouldn't do so IF and WHEN it did NOT block usability. I mitigate this some by doing automatic backups of all our systems, every night, including the attached USB drives if they are attached at the time the backup job is ran. (We use Bacula, and it gets around the issue of assessing USB drives by having a client daemon run locally on each system and only one central server, Since the clients are local processes they can access the local USB drive without any problem, just like a local user can). I don't think my systems are all that messed up either, I just did a fresh install of openSuSE11.3 on two of my systems here, and with just NFS set up, using just the default settings that YaST2 set the NFS server up with, I am still unable to access a USB drive that is connected to these systems, from the other system, across the network. I remain convinced that there is some security setting somewhere that is preventing (write) access to a USB drive from across the network. Why going through a Samba autofs mount point allows read access only when reaching the USB drive, and going though an NFS autofs mount allows neither, is beyond my grok capabilities at the moment.. To me, they both should have just worked and chmod/chown should have been sufficient to handled the settings of access permissions. Simple as that.... IF chmod/chown had worked, then I might look further to see how to add users, coming from other computers, across the network, to a group and further tightened security access. But adding network users to a group is something I have yet to figure out how to do... I appreciate all your time Anton and suggestions. And yes perhaps I am being stubborn, but unless you, or anyone else, can come up with a solution on how to mount USB drives so they can be writable, from across the network, I think it is time to call it a day and we will just continue to live with this problem... Marc... P.S. BTW the Western Digital's "My Passport" USB disk drives ARE rotating magnetic media and NOT flash drives. As such they are just as robust as internal disk drives, very fast, and can perform lots of read/write operations. I even run openSuSE off of an external eSata/USB Seagate drive (it can be either, just requires a different cable/head) and it too is a rotating magnetic media. USB drives are not necessarily flash nor slow any more. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org