FC2 granting rw on FAT32 dir [solved]

[Duncan Lithgow]

James Wilkinson wrote:
> Duncan Lithgow wrote:
> 
>>I simply can't work out how to get read/write permission to all member
>>of the 'common' group. What I want is:
>>hda1 ro to group=common (WinXP)
>>hda6 rw to group=common (SharedFiles)
>>
>>From what I can tell root currently has ownership and group is also 
>>root, no-one else can write.
>>
>>In FC2 when i go into /mnt/SharedFiles > Properties > Permissions and
>>try to change anything i get the message
>>
>>"The group could not be changed
>>- You do not have the permissions necessary to change the group of
>>'SharedFiles' ".
>>
>>Seems absurd - as I'm logged in as root, and own the partition/directory.
>>
>>In XP(SP2) if i look at 'E:\ > Properties > Sharing' both the 'Share
>>this folder on a network' (i have a local network) and 'Allow network
>>users to change my files' are ticked.
> 
> 
> OK: first misapprehension. "Share this folder on a network" means "Use
> Windows XP's networking stack to make this available to other computers
> on the network. When you're running Fedora, you're not running XP (on
> that machine), so it's not relevant.
> 
> Secondly, your SharedFiles partition is formatted as FAT32. This is
> good: Linux can write to it. But there is inherently no concept of file
> ownership on FAT32: Windows pretends there is, sometimes, but there's
> nothing for root or anyone to change on the disk.
> 
> Your WinXP partition is NTFS. There's very limited support for writing
> it, and it doesn't come with Fedora. You either have to compile your own
> kernel, or install appropriate RPMS: see
> http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/fedora3.html
> 
> NTFS *does* have concepts of users and ownership, but it doesn't map
> easily to Linux users. So far, the developers haven't tried.
> 
> So how do you change user rights on mounted filesystems?
> 
> My fstab file included these lines:
> /dev/hda11 /mnt/data   vfat defaults,gid=501,dmask=2,fmask=113 0 0
> /dev/hda5  /mnt/winnt  ntfs noauto,gid=501,dmask=2,fmask=113 0 0
> 
> 501 is the group with write access to the drives: in your case, do
> grep common /etc/group
> and take the number in the third field.
> 
> Hope this helps,
> 
> James.
OK, thanks. Works great now. One less thing to get to grips with...

those lines now read:

/dev/hda1		/mnt/WinXP		ntfs	auto,defaults,gid=501,dmask=2,fmask=113 0 0
/dev/hda6		/mnt/SharedFiles	vfat auto,defaults,gid=501,dmask=2,fmask=113 0 0

See any problems with that? I just need to get the correct kernel so i 
can read ntfs again.

Duncan