Hard Drive Write Access Problems. Chmod not Working.
 

Hi!

I have just installed Clarkconnect 4.3 to be my home server. It has a 750gig hard drive which i am trying to share and mount to /media.

I have it sharing fine but i can't get write access to the drive. when i do
chmod -R 777 /media
as root, the permissions change to drwxr-xr-x . I can't seem to figure out why?

Thanks in advance.

You've got a 750 GB drive. Did you partition it? Did you put a file system on it? What kind of file system did you use? Did you mount the file system? How?

I used one big Fat32 partition for the whole drive.
And its mounted at /media.

You say you tried to share it. How did you do it?

You can't use chmod or chown on a fat32 filesystem. The filesystem doesn't save Linux permissions. Since you have it mounted on /media/, is it automounted? An option in properties for the drive icon (in kde at least) will allow you to change how a device is mounted.

If not, use the "uid", "gid", "dmask" and "fmask" mount options to change the permissions en mass when the device is mounted. See the man mount page.

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For a Linux filesystem, if you are using Samba, then also check the smb.conf file and its share definition.
If this is a globally writable file, and you see a line in the Global section like:
map to guest = Bad User

and a line in the service defintion like:
usershare allow guests = Yes

then make sure that the user "nobody" has access to the directory.

If you use "Security = User" instead, then create a user account for each Windows user and use "sudo /usr/bin/smbpasswd -a <USERNAME>" to add a samba user and the user's password. Also check the permissions on the server's directory being shared. To allow each user to write to the share, but protect a file from being deleted by a non-owner, then set the sticky bit on the directory.
For example,
sudo mkdir /usr/srv/music
sudo chown root.root /srv/samba/music
sudo chmod a=rwxt /srv/samba/music

It is up to the file owner whether they want to make a file read only protecting it from being overwritten or modified.

More information and countless variations can be found in the "Samba 3 by Example" and "Samba 3 HOWTO & Reference" from the samba-doc package or from their web site.

--

If you are sharing an external drive, reformatting it in a Linux native filesystem will allow more granular user & permissions control.

This answered my question! Thanks!

I added umask=000 to fstab and that made everything work! :)