Re: permissions on a Verbatim USB external drive

[João Luis Meloni Assirati <assirati@nonada.if.usp.br>]

Em 13-03-2013 07:37, Lisi Reisz escreveu:
> On Tuesday 12 March 2013 18:58:16 John L. Cunningham wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 05:31:57PM +0000, Lisi Reisz wrote:
> > > The Verbatim belongs to User, and needs to function on his box.  But it
> > > cannot be written to from his box, even as root, and returns "access
> > > denied" to most files and directories that I try to copy over.
> > What is the filesystem on the drive?  Sounds like NTFS, and it's being
> > mounted using the read-only ntfs driver. Install ntfs-3g and try
> > mounting it with that.
> Thanks for the help.
>
> Sorry, I should have said.  From the result of the konsole command<mount>  on
> my desktop:
> <quote>  /dev/sdd1 on /media/usb0 type vfat</quote>
>
> It "works" fine attached to my computer, which is running Squeeze.  But it
> needs to work attached to its owner's computer, which is also running
> Squeeze.
>
> Lisi

Since vfat filesystems don't hold UNIX permissions, it has to be mounted 
with the umask and/or uid, gid options. If it is plugged through USB and 
you have a mount desktop service communicating with dbus, all should be 
automatic. However, if User mounts it in a static configuration in 
fstab, at least the umask must be set. If this is the case, try an fstab 
line like

/dev/sd??   /media/vfat   vfat   defaults,umask=0007,uid=User,gid=User   
0   0

which grants permission for User. A more flexible configuration would be 
to create a special group, say fat, and add all users that need to 
access the disk to this group, and then configure the fstab entry with 
uid=root,gid=fat.

João Luis.