Writing to one disk from two or more computers at the same time
 

Hello, another naive question.


I've got a few linux boxes (fedora 13 and 11) with a common disk mounted. I'm trying to get them all to write files to that disk, however it seems that only the first to connect actually has permission to write.

I'm very new to this networking stuff and this is a bit of a hack. Is there anyway to give all computers write access to a disk (it's actually a managed back up disk, primarily for windows users but is the only shared disk in the building), or is this likely to be very very complicated?


Thanks
Sven

You didn't say how the disk was externally mounted, so I'll assume it's NFS mounted.

Here's some info to read.

http://www.linuxhomenetworking.com/w...ccess_with_NFS

What is the error reported if any?

I would also assume you are sharing the drive via samba since you mentioned windows. You really have not provided much information and therefore difficult to provide help.

Please define what you mean by common disk? External USB, SATA etc...
Which computer if any is it attached to?
What is its filesystem?
How is it being shared? NFS samba etc.
What are its permissions?
How is it mounted?
If sharing via samba post the section from smb.conf
As already asked what are the error messages?

I'll bet OP has that disk mounted multiple times, not shared. This would be the source of the problem; every filesystem will expect to have exclusive access to the disk, and strange things happen when two or more operating systems simultaneously mount the drive.

The drive should be mounted on one system, which then shares it via SMB or NFS to everyone else. Then it will work.

Thanks for those questions. I'll check with the sysadmin (a windows man).

From the sys admin

"As for the questions:
The shared folder is an SMB share on a Windows server. Your user account has full share access permissions and full NTFS permissions on the disk itself which is directly attached to the server."

Is this a real server or a shared drive on a workstation?
I assume you are not trying to write to the same file at the same time.

Hi, I believe it's a real server, run by it's own computer.

I'm trying to write to different files with each computer (initialy just "touching" a blank file).

I used "mount -t cifs..." to connect all the computers to the drive.