permissions on VFAT partitions

[John H Terpstra]

Linux distributions often allow mounting of FAT and VFAT file systems in
read-only mode to avoid file system corruption. So far as I am aware this
is not a current real issue but more based out of fear.

I regularly mount my MS Windows 98 disk partition to transfer files from
my Ext3 Linux paritition for use under MS Windows. It is important that
the mount point has appropriate user.group file system permissions. My
users have no problem writing to the VFAT partition.

More to the point though, why have any real VFAT partitions? Under Samba
there are 'per share' parameters to determine the capabilities of the file
system even if the underlying technology is Ext2 or something else.

- John T.

> Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2001 09:19:04 -0600
> From: Thomas Cameron <Thomas.Cameron at CameronTech.com>
> To: samba <samba at lists.samba.org>
> Cc: Rodger Haynes <rodger at thompsonprint.com>
> Subject: Re: permissions on VFAT partitions
>
> In my experience, only root can write to vfat partitions.  Regular users
> cannot.
>
> Thomas
>
> Rodger Haynes wrote:
>
>>I'm running RH7.1 and Samba 2.2.2 . I would like to offer a VFAT
>>partition on the server  hard drive for universal read-write access. I
>>mount the partition in fstab with
>>
>>/dev.hda5    /sys    vfat    defaults,rw,uid=1001,gid=1001    0 0
>>
>>It mounts fine and shows up on the Windows 98 machine and can be opened.
>>I can't write to it however.
>>User and group 1001 are smbuser account, and they show up in /ls -l as
>>the owner and group.
>>security=share
>>I'm logging in from host "rodger" - this account exists in hosts file
>>chmod 777 /sys -R and chmod 777 /sys/* -R doesn't seem to get the job
>>done either.
>>I can set up directories under / and make them universally accessable, I
>>just can't seem to do it with VFAT
>>I'm new to the Linux world and would really appreciate any help you can
>>give me. Thanks in advance. -Rodger