writing to samba shares from win

wokno the sane · n00b Joined: 18 Dec 2002 Posts: 20

I have several partitions i am trying to share with my windows PC's. The windows PC's can see the shares, and the files in them, but can't write/delete to them. I am allowing all to connect as guest (it's a home network so not really concerned about per user security), and the shares are supposedly configured for write access in smb.conf. The partitions are all mounted in /mnt, but have permissions 751. if i try to chmod the mount points, the change does not show up (permissions still 751). I can chmod the mount points when the partitions are unmounted, but when they are remounted, the permissions again stay at 751. I'm not sure if it matters, but these partitons are all formated fat32 (for win XP dual boot).

474 · l33t Joined: 19 Apr 2002 Posts: 714

It certainly does matter. FAT filesystems don't support security! And even if they did, they wouldn't support Unix type permissions ...

But you can mount a FAT filesystem with arbitrary security permissions (permissions as far as your Unix system is concerned) which will be applied to every file and directory on the partition, which should solve your problem. When I say applied, I don't mean it will actually change anything on the FAT partition (it won't), it just mocks up security permissions globally for the whole thing. Example: you have the usernames of your user accounts which need acccess in a group called lanusers. Mount your partition something like this:

wokno the sane · n00b Joined: 18 Dec 2002 Posts: 20

I have already found the answer, and thought I posted back here with it, but I guess I didn't. That's not exactly what I did to get it working. I added umask=000 to my fstab and it works great. The approach sugested above would be better for people more concerned with security though. Thanks for the help.