Here's the scoop: I need to mount a samba share on my Macintosh from a user account in my Knoppix-powered Dell.

When I do, Knoppix seems to honor the group permissions found on the Mac, rather than the user permissions - meaning I can neither read nor wrote to certain directories unless I give those permissions to the group on the Mac itself - a lot of work since many directories don't have the group permissions I need.

I used to solve this problem in Red Hat by making an entry in FSTAB but here's the thing: when you boot into Knoppix it edits the FSTAB each time (even a HD install) and so my entries keep getting changed! I therefore have been using the following shell script to mount the shares, logged into a shell as root but using an ordinary user account in Knoppix (ie not logged into a root KDE session, etc)

#!/bin/bash

smbmount //Mac/share /mnt/mac -o username=rhoyer,uid=rhoyer,rw,dmask=777,fmask=777

If I use the identical scrpt, logged in as root (which of course I never usually do) I it appears that the permissions are fully opened - so the issue is not on the Mac side of things.

Is there any way to modify my syntax to give the correct permissions?

Normally, you set suid on the smbmount & smbumount binaries to allow normal users to mount samba shares.

chmod +s /usr/bin/smbmnt
chmod +s /usr/bin/smbumount

I'm not that familiar with Knoppix though, so I'm not sure how you'd go about making that stick after a reboot. I presume you could remaster the CD, if you're using a CD. Else place it in a script and run that script on bootup.

[Removed].

I found a flaw in my syntax, and now I am actually able to modify FSTAB to retain the smb shares on reboot. However, I still have the same issue that I had before: even though I specify the username in the fstab entry, only resources with "other" permissions can be read or written on the Mac.

I strongly suspect the following is the reason: while the username is the same on both machines, my primary username = UID 1000 in Knoppix but UID 501 on the Mac! I think that when I am logged in as root in KNoppix this distinction doesn't matter, but when when I am in the user account, the Knoppix PC isn't concerned that the username is the same on the Mac's files, it looks at the numeric UID and bases its permissions on that, despite my having dmask=777 and fmask=777 in the fstab entry. Any ideas as to why my dmask and fmask aren't working?