Hi guys,

I'm mounting a windows partition to a RHEL3 box using smbmount. The mount is successful but then I'm experiencing problems with permissions.

At mount time I set fmask=777, dmask=777, and umask=000 (I think this is the correct "everyone can control everything" option?), and when mounted, every file and directory has 777 permissions - fine.

Now when I attempt to chmod any of the files/directories I have varying success:

set to 555 - good
set to 777 - good
set to 5xx - complains, reports error but sets to 555
set to 7xx - complains, reports error but sets to 777
set to anything else - complains, keeps existing permissions.

I have no idea why this should be. I've sat with IT (the custodians of the Windows box) and we have found no problems there.

I have noticed that when I mount this area to an FC4 machine the process fails in the same manner, but the version of chmod on FC4 doesn't report an error. I am also able to mount using CIFS on the FC4 machine (not supported on RHEL3, and it would be a political issue for me to bodge the kernel as getting a linux box through the door in the first place was hard enough) and change permissions to my heart's content, which further convinces me that it's something on the linux side.

So has anyone got any ideas for me? I have to confess to being a little stumped.

Jo

I've just answered a similar question in the Slackware forum, so I hope no one minds a little cut and paste :-)

Windows network file shares do not work like NFS file shares. The fmask, dmask, uid and gid options are all designed to provide the necessary Linux file permissions to the this foriegn file system. They do not affect the NTFS or FAT32 partition on the remote server. The username that you used in the credentials file is the user that Windows uses to determine permissions and ownership for the NTFS partition. For example, if you used a user account that had read-only permission to the NTFS file system, you would not be able to create, modify or delete files even though you specified the rw option in the mount command because the Windows user can't either.

Nor do changing of permissions work. The Linux chmod function doesn't traslate to the Windows world and it (almost) always fails on an SMB mounted file system.

I hope this helps.

Yes that would make a lot of sense but it's not the news that I wanted to hear

Oh well ...