[SWLUG] SAMBA not allowing me to write

[Jonathan Wright]

Stephen Constantinou wrote:
> Dear All
> 
> I am using my laptop that only has Mandriva 2008 on it and I am having 
> some difficulty configuring SAMBA so that I can write to the XP HDD of 
> the PC.  I can mount the file system, browse it but not write to it.
> 
> I have mounted the file system inside my home directory:
> /home/stephanos/dell/.  The icon shows the folder with a red plug on it.
> ls -l reveals
> drwxr-xr-x 1 root     root       4096 2008-01-07 21:00 dell/
> 
> I have tried to use chmod (as root of course) to change the file 
> permissions:
>   [root at localhost stephanos]# chmod a=rw- /home/stephanos/dell
>   [root at localhost stephanos]#
> 
>   [root at localhost stephanos]# ls -l reveals
>    drwxr-xr-x 1 root   root  4096 2008-01-07 21:00 dell/

Windows file-systems (I'm assuming here the type is vfat, as Linux/Unix 
cannot write to NTFS file-systems at the moment and it's tied in with 
the Registry and UUIDs created through Windows) don't have the same 
permissions system as Linux.

Fat/Fat32 is the worst, and in fact has none. But, as Linux requires 
them, but default they're set to the person mounting (which in almost 
all cases is the root user). However, you can modify this with the mount 
command.

For example, the uid= and gid= options allow you to set the IDs of the 
user and groups when it mounts. Look through your /etc/passwd and 
/etc/group files for your uid and uid vales (they're numbers, not 
names), or run 'ls -nda .' in your home directory:

jonathan on jonathan [ ~ ] --> ls -lad .
drwxr-xr-x 67 jonathan users 4096 2008-01-07 15:24 .
jonathan on jonathan [ ~ ] --> ls -nad .
drwxr-xr-x 67 1000 100 4096 2008-01-07 15:24 .

My uid is 1000 and gid is 100.

You can also use the umask, dmask or fmask options to change the 
permissions levels of all files & folders, just folders or just files 
respectivly.

So, 002 will give read & write access to both users and groups rather 
than just users.

Combining it all, you should be able to do this:

mount /dev/drive -t vfat -o uid=1000,gid=100,umask=002 /mnt/directory

Anyway, hope that helps! :)

-- 
Jonathan Wright

  e: jonathan at netwrker.co.uk
  w: http://netwrker.co.uk/

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