James, On Saturday 24 December 2005 14:40, James Knott wrote:

James Knott wrote:

...

I've been testing a USB attached hard drive and noticed something peculiar. If I format the drive with Reiser or , only root can write to it. If I format FAT32, users can also write. Users can always read, no matter what format is used. It is not mounted with fstab. Any ideas as to why the difference?

tnx jk

That should read "Reiser or ext3"

All native Linux file systems (Reiser, ext, XFS, JFS, etc.) share the same basic permissions structure. FAT, on the other hand, has no notion of user IDs associated with the files and directories. So when mounted on Unix or Linux systems, FAT32 volumes usually have a single user ID associated with all the files contained therein and that UID is usually specified in the volume's fstab entry. If you want users to be able to create files at the root of a mounted native file system, mount it and change the mode of the root directory (of that volume, not of your system as a whole) to allow read, write and execute by all (i.e, "chmod 777 /mountdir"). You might want to consider using the sticky bit, as is done with directories such as /tmp (for that use "chmod 1777 /mountdir"). This way no one can remove an entry unless they're the person who created it in the first place. Assuming you have an fstab entry for this disk volume, you might want to show us what it is so we can give more definitive information. If you're supplying all the information in the mount command, then show us exactly what that mount command is. And if it's the latter, you really should consider creating an fstab entry for this volume. Things are much less tedious this way and you can get the system to mount and check the file system for during start-up. Lastly unless you need to mount this volume on a Windows system, FAT file system volumes are very much not recommended. Randall Schulz