Need help with fstab config

[Darragh Bailey]

On Wed, 4 Aug 2004, James Wilkinson wrote:

> Do you want them to be automatically mounted on boot?
>
> Try users, not user.
>
> On /mnt/D, try adding dmask=0,fmask=111, to get reasonable file
> permissions. Or do what I do: create a group (I call it data), put all
> the users that are allowed to write to the partition in it, and add
> gid=501, where 501 is the group ID of your group.

To be honest I don't think you want to use the users option unless you
want all users to be able to mount and umount the filesystem. That really
only comes of benifit if you don't want the partition mounted at boot by
the system and where it has been mounted by a user you want any other user
to be able to umount it.


Stick to altering the file permissions using either the options James has
indicated above or something like the following that I use for mounting my
fat partitions.

/dev/hda5	/mnt/D	vfat defaults,gid=500,uid=0,umask=0002	0
0

This makes sure that its mounted by root at boot up and is not unmountable
by any user even though the users in the group given by id 500 have full
access to the filesystem and all others have just read & execute. You can
limit this further if you desire.

Notice the use of vfat instead of auto as the filesystem type, this is
because on occassion the system gets it wrong and uses fat16 for a fat
filesystem instead of fat32 where auto was set as the filesystem. It
should be avoided if you know exactly what the file system is and what it
will remain to be.

btw, I'm not certain if the dmask and fmask options are available to use
for vfat file systems, check man mount for mounting options. AFAIK, only
umask is available to alter permissions.


--
Darragh

"Nothing's foolproof to a sufficently talented fool"