read/write remote access to fat32 via samba
 

Hello !

I am new here, and I expect you guys can solve my problem

It as been a week I try to transfer a win2k server to mandrake 9.2
Hard job, since Linux was fairly new to me.

Anyway, I am almost there, but there is still a problem I coul'nt solve.
Using webmin, I did every manipulation I could, but I was not able to gain write access to the fat32 partition mounted on the linus server.

All the files on the disk seem to be property of 'administrator" user (same password as root) being administrator, I can read and write from a remote wink2 , from Linux too, BUT
Being anyone else, I can only read, and this applies to a local login, no user can write to that partition.

I already read lots of posts on this forum and on some others, but nothing worked. (use of umask mounting the drive...)
I do not really need a write access in Linux, but this seem to be a need to be able to get a remote write access (I read somewhere something about local read/write rights overriding samba rights)

Thank you for your help

I'm not a samba expert, but I do have some experience in using fat32 from linux. The thing to bear in mind is that fat32 sucks: it simply doesn't store the kind of information that a filesystem like ext does (or NTFS, for that matter). As such, upon mounting a fat32 partition, the kernel has to make some things up, such as the owner of the file. By default, this will be root, but you can edit /etc/fstab to give any other user ownership on the files in a fat32 filesystem. Assigning proper per-user privileges isn't possible AFAIK. There's really no very good reason for using FAT32 unless you're on a dual-booting machine (doesn't sound like it in this case) or you've got important stuff and no way to back it up for transferring to a new partition.

Perhaps I'm being overly pessimistic, and someone else can contribute.

problem solved !
 

Ok thank you for your help;

I can understand you guys have been a bit puzzled by my question, the problem beeing so simple to solve.
I did not now the mounting was not refreshed by changing login. fstab is only used at startup ! So all the changes I tried were mere, since I never tried to shutdown.
thanks to other posts on this forum, it works !
Tim