mount problem

[Craig White]

On Fri, 2007-01-26 at 15:02 +0000, Anne Wilson wrote:
> On Friday 26 January 2007 14:37, T. Horsnell wrote:
> > >I have a partition for holding temporary large files, which fstab causes
> > > to be mounted as ro for user.  I tried changing fstab as so:
> > >
> > >LABEL=/mnt/Holding      /mnt/Holding            ext3    user,rw         1
> > > 2
> > >
> > >saved, then
> > >
> > >mount -a
> > >
> > >ls -l /mnt/
> > >total 24
> > >drwxr-xr-x  6 root root 4096 Feb 25  2006 FC4home
> > >drwxr-xr-x 23 root root 4096 Nov  1 10:38 FC4root
> > >drwxr-xr-x  6 root root 4096 Jan 25 19:10 Holding
> > >
> > >ls -l /mnt/Holding
> > >total 40
> > >drwxr-xr-x 2 root root  4096 Jan 26 11:17 Egypt
> > >drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Nov  1 10:45 lost+found
> > >drwxr-xr-x 2 root root  4096 Apr 18  2006 MickyAndy
> > >drwxr-xr-x 2 root root  4096 Jan 11 13:45 RomanticRoad2
> > >
> > >I do need to be able to utilise space in these directories.  What am I
> > >missing?
> >
> > If your problem is that the directories are still owned by root,
> > then simply changing from user,ro to user,rw wont fix that.
> >
> > ro/rw affects the writeablity at the device level, not at the
> > per-user level. It wont change ownership of the directories
> > on the device.
> >
> > What did you hope would happen? Did you want the directories
> > to become owned by the user who mounted the device?
> >
> I simply want users to be able to write to those directories.  I hate having 
> to do things as root when it isn't necessary or advisable for security.  
> The /mnt/Holding one is the vital one.  That was deliberately set up with 
> huge amounts of space for this purpose.
----
you might want to consider doing things like this...

if all 'users' are members of 'users' group

chgrp users /mnt/Holding -R
chmod g+s /mnt/Holding -R
chmod g+w /mnt/Holding -R

bear in mind that users with a default umask of 022 will create files
with a 644 and folders with 755 permissions which means that other users
will not be able to 'write' into those directories or over those files.

Craig