Hi,
I am trying to run an ftp server on my machine (vsftpd), with anonymous write enabled. I want only the "uploads" folder to be writable and all the others to be read-only. The problem is that I'm not able to set read-only mount permissions on these other folders. The specific line in the fstab file is:

/mnt/intersys/Songz /var/ftp/Songz none ro,bind 0 0

The "/mnt/intersys/Songz" folder is the folder on the fat32 partition which I want to mount as read-only on the "/var/ftp/Songz" folder. However I see that anonymously logged clients are still able to perform write operations here. Delete operations are not possible but that's because the server property disallows that (by setting anon_other_write_enable to 'NO' in the vsftpd.conf file). Can anyone tell me why the ro mount isn't working?

P.S. I've also mounted a folder on a reiserfs partition on /var/ftp with 'ro'and this is working fine. The lines used to mount the vfat and the reiserfs partion are:

/dev/hda5 /usr reiserfs notail 1 2
/dev/hda3 /mnt/intersys vfat umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850 0 0

(These were generated automatically during the linux installation)

I'm by no means an expert on this, but from experience, this is partially why MS is moving to NTFS. vfat has no real read/write limits available. Despite attempts to implement a good solution, nothing is really foolproof. There are simply too many ways to access that filesystem. By allowing write access on one folder, you intrinsically allow that on all of them. The permissions in vfat aren't for the folders, but for the drive itself.

Like I said, I'm no expert, but there's a reason MS recommends ntfs for anything critical.

Hey...
Turns out that's exactly what the problem was!! I shifted the uploads folder to a reiserfs partition, leaving all the vfat mounts as 'ro' and things r working fine now!!

Thanks a lot!!!