Testing apps on dual booting machine.

[Robert Storey]

On Wed, 2 Feb 2005 07:01:11 -0500
"M.Rudra" <dr.rudra at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks james, excuse the delay as i was out :-)
> 
> James Wilkinson <james at westexe.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> > So root can write, but normal users can't? Or can normal users not
> > even read it?
> 
> root can read but users cant access files in winXP c:/d:/e: partition
> drives  (maybe permissions are not set) and what is the procedure to
> do that  ?
> 
> 
> 
> > It's "safe" as in support for vfat is very good, so you're not going
> > to lose data to a filesystem bug. [1] It's good practice not to use
> > root more often than necessary, so you may want to give normal users
> > *more* access: investigate the dmask and fmask options in man mount
> > and man fstab.
> > 
> 
> i did try that and this is the result : 
> 
> [rudra at localhost rudra]$ dmask
> bash: dmask: command not found
> [rudra at localhost rudra]$ fmask
> bash: fmask: command not found
> [rudra at localhost rudra]$ fstab
> bash: fstab: command not found
> 
> 
> 
> 
> > (Unlike "real" Unix-like filesystems, vfat has no support for user
> > ids and very little support for permissions. Under Linux, you'll
> > find that all files on a vfat partition have the same permissions.
> > This is good for your purposes: if one file is safe, then they all
> > are). You might want to set up a group for accessing the vfat
> > partition: put your normal user account in it, so it can read and
> > write, and leave your development user account out, so it can't
> > write to the partition. I don't know if you know how to read ls -l
> > output: take a look at
> >http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Unix-and-Internet-Fundamentals-HOWTO/disk-
> >layout.html#permissions


I had something like this set up a few years ago (when I was still using
Windows/DOS in a dual-boot system with Linux). I still have the notes on
it - I set it up as follows...

Add a line in /etc/fstab like:

/dev/hda1  /dos   vfat   rw,noexec,uid=1015,gid=102,umask=007, 0 0

The uid and gid are for a user dos and group dos which I created. The
user dos has a ! in /etc/passwd where the password entry would go so
it cannot log in.  I add any users which need access to that
partition to group dos. Any files in that partition are only readable
and writeable by user dos and members of group dos.

That should do it.

regards,
Robert