I initially posted this in cragwolf's "Just Installed" thread but I think I really should create my own thread. Any clarification is greatly appreciated:


I am in the process of setting up a basic low-load Slackware server. I bought a 200gig hdd to complement my 80gig hdd. I did all the hard work of getting Slack up and running, and formatting and partitioning the new drive as ReiserFS. Before I did this, I had the 200 gig hdd formatted as ntfs so I could backup the 80 gig hdd onto it from within windows. I mounted the 200 gig ntfs drive, transferred my data back to the old drive, then partitioned and formatted the new drive. Now both drives are happily on my Slackware system in linux filesystems.

Now for the question: I would like this drive to behave as an extension of the 80gig drive. What I mean by extension is that I want to mount the drive inside the home directory of a specific user, and have this behave as if this directory "belongs" to that user.

My 80 gig drive has a swap partition and a root partition, and the 200 gig drive has one partition. I would like to mount it in the home directory of one of my users. What I did was I copied the fstab line for my root partition and obviously changed "/" to "/home/server/downloads", where server is the name of my user and downloads is what I would like to mount it as.

I am confused about three things:

1: Should I use, as options: "rw,user" or am I missing something? Is this umask business only for ntfs or fat partitions?

2: Why does the "defaults" fstab option not do what I want it to? (I can only access the drive as root, but I would like a normal user to be able to read and write to the drive). I do not understand why... the root partition is mounted using the defaults, yet, under different users, I have permission to write to certain areas of the disk.

3: I am mounting to /home/server/downloads. /home/server obviously already exists, but when I make the downloads directory, can I just make a folder, or do I need to make a link from /dev/hdb1? In terms of permissions, if I made the directory as a normal user, and the drive were mounted using "defaults". would it be possible for this user be able to read and write to this hard disk? Or is the only way for any user other than root to be able to write to the disk via the options "rw,user" when the drive is mounted?

Another thing: If I make changes to fstab, is there a way to "refresh" and have the new changes take effect without a reboot? Or, when I'm experimenting, should I stick with the mount and umount commands?

Thanks so much in advance. I realize that my questions may be confusing, but I am really confused. I've tried looking for answers, but the man pages don't address my concerns and I haven't found any other useful documents.

check the permissions on:
/home/server/downloads
if you want users to access it make sure it is owned by the users group with whatever access you want the users to have.
If that doesn't help please post your fstab

I think we need to see your /etc/fstab. The line for /home/server/downloads should provide the "link" to the /dev/hdb. You will then need to mkdir /home/server/downloads, if I understand your question.

I already did a mkdir /home/server/downloads. Initially I did this as root, so root owned the folder. Then I rebooted with this fstab:

/dev/hda1 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hda2 / reiserfs defaults 1 1
/dev/hdc /mnt/dvd-rom iso9660 noauto,owner,ro 0 0
/dev/hdd /mnt/cd-rw iso9660 noauto,user,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0

/dev/hdb1 /home/server/downloads/sorted reiserfs defaults 1 2


But I could not write to the directory unless logged in with root.

I remade home/server/downloads as my user 'server'. With this same fstab, will I be able to access and write to this folder? Or do I need to replace "defaults" with "rw,user" or something else?

Didn't work using "/dev/hdb1 /home/server/downloads/sorted reiserfs defaults 1 2"

I created the folder, and the owner is server, of the group users.
After adding the above line to my fstab and rebooting, the same folder shows an owner of root in the group root. Other users only have read and execute permissions.

So I guess I will try replacing "defaults" to "rw,user" in the above line.

And now


/dev/hdb1 /home/server/downloads/sorted reiserfs rw,user 1 2


didn't work either


Any ideas?

If the drive is mounted, use the chown command on the mounted directory.

chown server /home/server/downloads/sorted

Make sure that the drive is mounted first.

This is in contrast to using an external usb drive. With some file systems such as vfat, or smb, the user and group ownership is set when mounting using the uid= and gid= options.

Also, double check whether or not you can read the contents of another login members home directory. If you have group ownership of users on all of the users, this may be the case.

/home/server/downloads/sorted ???????
you need to 'mkdir sorted' also

Yes, I have done that.

Edit: Now I understand your confusion. I was always intending to mount to /home/server/download/sorted, but I forgot to add the /sorted in my original posts. Sorry about that!

I will have to issue this command as root, correct? Will I need to do this each time that I reboot?


I will check this when I get home. I think that all users that I create are automatically added to the group 'users.' I'm not sure that I understand how this relates to this issue. If you could clarify, that would be great.


Just so I understand, do you recommend that I use 'chown' to change the ownership of the mounted directory? Does it matter whether I mount the drive as:

/dev/hdb1 /home/server/downloads/sorted reiserfs rw,user 1 2

or

dev/hdb1 /home/server/downloads/sorted reiserfs defaults 1 2

?

try this:
/dev/hdb1 /home/server/downloads/sorted reiserfs defaults 1 2

Only works if I'm logged in as root
Or should I use this line and chown as suggested by jschiwal?

If you would include the output line from the mount command for your partition, and the output of ls -ld /home/server/downloads/sorted then we could follow along how the partition is mounted and what the permissions are. The -d option will print out the long listing of the directory entry itself rather than the contents of the directory. The -l option will show the user, group and other permission bits for the directory.

Your /home/server directory seems to be a place where you are storing downloads. You haven't indicated what your user name is. ( I'm assuming it isn't 'server' ). If so, you need to be a member of the group for the /home/server directory. Also the directory needs at least 770 permission to allow you to enter it and write files to it. ( The execute permission allows entering directories ) The files need at least 0760 permissions so the umask should be no more restrictive than 017.

Maybe things would be easier if the partition were mounted on the root partition instead. You could include a symbolic link from /home/server/downloads/sorted instead.

About the group users. It depends how the group permissions are set. I just purchased SuSE 9.1 myself. I had been using Mandrake. With Mandrake, their useradd script and GUI program will create a new group also by the same name.

My suggestion was to log in as one user and check if you can read files in another users home directory. If so, you may want add a unique group and chown all of your home directory to this group, ( probably using your login name for the group name ).

'server' is actually the name of the user
This computer is actually going to be my personal server, mainly for storing my media files (so I can access them via the network), and also to run apache, among some other "server" tasks.

I created a new user (of the same group as 'server'), and I cannot access the test user's directory in home from server's account. The permissions are automatically set as 'rwx--x--x'.


My pertinent fstab section:

Relevant output of 'mount':

Output of 'ls -ld /home/server/downloads/sorted':

I'm looking at 'man mount' right now. All of the options (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) seem OK. The only thing that I do not understand is what suid means.

I don't really know what this means. Is it possible that adding suid to the options will work, or am I misinterpreting?

The only problem seems to be that root is mounting the file system. I want the filesystem mounted by server.

There is something very interesting in mount(8), however:

This seems to only apply to the adfs filesystem. To me, it seems like the kind of thing that I would need. I see nothing of the sort for ext2, ext3, or reiserfs.


Is my only option at this point to use the chown command on /home/server/downloads/sorted? Is this something that needs to be done on each boot, and, if so, is there a way to have it done automatically?

Thank you so much for any help!

It worked

I can reboot, and the owner is still server. My second harddrive is set up exactly the way that I would like it to be. Thanks so much for all the help I've received!