Guest marco75 Posted February 18, 2008 Report Share Posted February 18, 2008 Background story, feel free to skip this part ============ I have been dabbling in Linux ever since RedHat 7.0. I have also used Ubuntu 7.04, 7.10, Mandrake 9.0, 9.1., 10 and now Free 2007 Spring. It's challenging, often frustrating, but on occasion I did get a dual boot workstation where I ended up spending more time in Linux mode than in Windows mode, which means the transition was starting to work. (The nice Linux install eventually fell over, which is why I don't make Win/Lin share the same drive anymore) I still like Windows XP, it's quite good, but it will be orphaned soon (in 2009?) and become unusable without Microsoft bugfix support. Red-hot pokers couldn't make me switch to Vista, so my generic x86 and x86-64 boxes will have to be turned to some flavor of Linux. Hence, I like to try out new distros now and then and see how it has progressed. =========================================== I'm trying out Mandriva in dual-boot configuration, and want to be able to write to my NTFS partitions, either by making them writable to all (rwxrwxrwx) or by changing owner to my user account (marco75,marco75). By the way, why does my user account constitute its own group? It would be strange of me to say "My name is Marco, of the clan Marco". Shouldn't user marco75 belong to group "users"? And how can a user, folder or file belong to more than one group? Could you create a group called admin that had permission to access all the GUI config tools, without being root? In that way, I could add marco75 to group admin and not have to type in my password every time I installed a program. But I digress ^_^ Okay, I look at /etc/fstab (it looks different in every distro!) and Mandrake install WAS nice enough to mount my NTFS partitions: /dev/hdb1 / ext3 defaults 1 1 /dev/hdc /media/cdrom auto umask=0,users,iocharset=utf8,noauto,ro,exec 0 0 none /media/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=utf8,sync 0 0 /dev/hda2 /mnt/downloads ntfs umask=0,nls=utf8,ro 0 0 /dev/hda3 /mnt/mame vfat umask=0,iocharset=utf8 0 0 /dev/hda4 /mnt/user ntfs umask=0,nls=utf8,ro 0 0 /dev/hda1 /mnt/xp ntfs umask=0,nls=utf8,ro 0 0 none /proc proc defaults 0 0 /dev/hdb5 swap swap defaults 0 0 Okay, ro obviously means read-only. So if I removed ro it would be writable by a regular user? Or do I need "users" in there as well? And what is umask? When I display a file's advanced permissions in Konqueror, it shows Special: Set UID, Set GID, Sticky. Naturally, I would like any new folders and files created in those writable NTFS partitions to be writable also. Is that what UID, GID and Sticky are for? How am I supposed to use them? If you can make me understand those file permission concepts, you would truly be The Great Communicator, as I attempted to learn on several occasions and just couldn't get my head around it. Thanks for reading! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted February 18, 2008 Report Share Posted February 18, 2008 By the way, why does my user account constitute its own group? It would be strange of me to say "My name is Marco, of the clan Marco". Shouldn't user marco75 belong to group "users"? And how can a user, folder or file belong to more than one group? Could you create a group called admin that had permission to access all the GUI config tools, without being root? In that way, I could add marco75 to group admin and not have to type in my password every time I installed a program. Some distros put you in a user group, others create your username as a group and you are default a member of this. You can add yourself to the admin group, or in fact other groups: gpasswd -a username group or for example: gpasswd -a marco75 admin to be more specific. But I digress ^_^ Okay, I look at /etc/fstab (it looks different in every distro!) and Mandrake install WAS nice enough to mount my NTFS partitions: /dev/hdb1 / ext3 defaults 1 1 /dev/hdc /media/cdrom auto umask=0,users,iocharset=utf8,noauto,ro,exec 0 0 none /media/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=utf8,sync 0 0 /dev/hda2 /mnt/downloads ntfs umask=0,nls=utf8,ro 0 0 /dev/hda3 /mnt/mame vfat umask=0,iocharset=utf8 0 0 /dev/hda4 /mnt/user ntfs umask=0,nls=utf8,ro 0 0 /dev/hda1 /mnt/xp ntfs umask=0,nls=utf8,ro 0 0 none /proc proc defaults 0 0 /dev/hdb5 swap swap defaults 0 0 Okay, ro obviously means read-only. So if I removed ro it would be writable by a regular user? Or do I need "users" in there as well? No, you would have to change it to rw, but I would also ensure you install the ntfs-3g package to get the best read/write support. And what is umask? When I display a file's advanced permissions in Konqueror, it shows Special: Set UID, Set GID, Sticky. Naturally, I would like any new folders and files created in those writable NTFS partitions to be writable also. Is that what UID, GID and Sticky are for? How am I supposed to use them? If you can make me understand those file permission concepts, you would truly be The Great Communicator, as I attempted to learn on several occasions and just couldn't get my head around it. Thanks for reading! NTFS will not support your uid/gid, etc. So, you will have to use umask and restrict to a particular user, or if you are the only user, then umask=0 is perfectly fine to ensure all files are accessible by that user on the system. Remember, it's a Windows filesystem, not a Linux one, therefore uid/gid is invalid for it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest marco75 Posted February 20, 2008 Report Share Posted February 20, 2008 You can add yourself to the admin group gpasswd -a marco75 admin I tried that, but there doesn't seem to be an admin group created by mdv-2007.1. I know I could create one, but that would be useless without giving it administrative properties (which I don't know how to do) I suppose I could make that user part of the 'root' group, but then wouldn't everything I do run at rootlevel, and potentially bork up the system? (this is a testbed system, so security isn't relevant just yet... making stuff work is more important at this point.) I have changed /etc/fstab to the following: /dev/hdb1 / ext3 defaults 1 1 /dev/hdc /media/cdrom auto umask=0,users,iocharset=utf8,noauto,ro,exec 0 0 none /media/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=utf8,sync 0 0 /dev/hda2 /mnt/downloads ntfs umask=0,nls=utf8,rw 0 0 /dev/hda3 /mnt/mame vfat umask=0,iocharset=utf8,rw 0 0 /dev/hda4 /mnt/user ntfs umask=0,nls=utf8,rw 0 0 /dev/hda1 /mnt/xp ntfs umask=0,nls=utf8,rw 0 0 none /proc proc defaults 0 0 /dev/hdb5 swap swap defaults 0 0 Now, will umask=0 give me WRITE access to the NTFS partitions? Let me end on a happy note, after installing LinNeighborhood I have been able to get some two-way file sharing working. The mounts in the Mandriva Control Center seem to be good only for the current session, I don't understand why it doesn't add the Windows' machine shares to /etc/fstab to make them permanent. Does anyone else know how 'MCC > Mount Points > Set Samba mount points' is intended to be used? Those boffins at Mandriva must have had some particular situation in mind when they designed it like that, surely. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Randy3011 Posted February 20, 2008 Report Share Posted February 20, 2008 Greetings, I have found two links that have been particularly useful to me and may help: http://www.mandrake.tips.4.free.fr/index.html http://www.howtoforge.com/howtos/linux/mandriva Hope this helps. Regards, Randy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Randy3011 Posted February 20, 2008 Report Share Posted February 20, 2008 Right after I wrote the above, I found the following: http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2008.1_Beta_2 ntfs-3g will be active by default in this next release. Randy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Randy3011 Posted March 12, 2008 Report Share Posted March 12, 2008 Hi again: Perhaps taking a look at this topic: NTFS partition Read/Write Regards, Randy3011 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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