On 2/5/2011 5:57 PM, Anton Aylward wrote:

Marc Chamberlin said the following on 02/05/2011 08:37 PM:

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That said, even using NFS to navigate to the mounted USB drive on her laptop, or v.s. for her to navigate to my USB drive, we hit an even worse roadblock. The moment we try to cd into the mounted drive, we can't even get permission to see what is there. I can demonstrate this -

Please explain why the cross-wise USB access is critical. The examples you've given so far don't explain what the "critical business process" is that requires you to transfer onto her USB stick rather than into her "public for import export" directory.

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...

If having the file end up on the USB is critical, can't you do this:

a) you: mv *.jpg ~/hers/importexportdir b) she: mv ~/importexportdir/*.jpg /media/sdb1/Pictures/

Yes, but this is a PITA.. that is what we have so far been doing.

I do recall your complaint about access permissions, but I think that allowing someone unrestricted access to all of your machine is a formula for acrimony.

"Why did you delete that file on my machine" "I didn't" Yes you did" "No I didn't" "Of course you did, you're the only one who could" "Well I didn't" "You must have because I didn't". ...

I agree that reducing security is a risk. But usability is far more important! I think the security wonks keep forgetting that. If security measures prevent one from using their computers, without having to invest hours and hours of time to grok em, then that IS a serious problem! Do some internet searching sometimes and you will find out that a great many users become frustrated with all the security layers and models being used, both in Linux and Windoz.

My attitude is to get the computer to a usable state first, THEN worry about security and notch it up as time and needs dictate and allow... The security models of Linux (and Windoz) are both inconsistent and extremely difficult to correct sometimes, and that can render a computer nearly unusable, or extremely difficult at best, for accomplishing some given task... (such as this one...)

We have worked out a model on how we want to solve our problem, theoretically transferring files directly to USB drives should follow the model of, and be as easy to perform, as transferring files to internal hard drives. The computer (Linux) should assist the user in doing such a simple task, NOT make it difficult!

Marc...