Subject: Samba and VFAT

[Fred Viles]

On 10 Mar 98 at 16:43, Henri J. Schlereth wrote about
    "Subject: Samba and VFAT":

} I am relatively new to the Unix world and  have a hopefully simple
} question. I  have a dual-boot Win95/Redhat system and would like to 
} have  the vfat mounted shares accessible under SAMBA as well.
} The default setting for vfat is r-x for group. Chmod, chown, chgrp refuse
} to alter this even  as root. (Permission  denied)

Right, there are no such permission bits to alter on a VFAT file 
system.  The permissions for group and world have to be specified for 
the entire file system at mount time, since the driver is just faking 
them.

} As root I can r/w to these #$%^  shares w/o any difficulty.
} Vfat does not seem to like it when I change these things in fstab

It should be fine to specify VFAT specific mount options in fstab.

} I have hunted for any references in this matter thru your digest and came up
} blank till my eyes burned.

This has nothing to do with Samba.  You need the umask= mount option,
and perhaps the uid= and gid= options.  These are documented in "man
mount" under fat specific mount options.

}...
} So  remote mounting of Windows shares is done but what about internally?
} Doing an smbmount seems to be clumsy when not connecting to a
} external machine. How does smbfs  compare to vfat, would I lose anything
} as far as Win95 goes? 

smbfs is like nfs, it is *only* for mounting a file system exported
from a remote machine via the SMB protocol.  It has nothing to do with
accessing partitions (in any format!) on a local disk.

}...

- Fred Viles (mailto:fv at episupport.com)