Mounting/owner/group for public FAT partition
 

Hi folks,

I've created a FAT32 partition for sharing files between operating systems (including WinXP, thus FAT). It's entry in /etc/fstab looks like this:
I just added the rw comment as an afterthought.

As things are, root has everything:
Would somebody be so kind as to point me to a reference where I can read up on how to make this partition available to all my users? I need to learn more about groups and owners in general; I figure I'll need to change the group, don't know about ownership. Certainly objects created in the folder need to inherit rwx for others.

Is it secure to allow "others" rwx access for a public partition? I can imagine it might be useful in an attack.

FAT doesn't support permissions, so the only way to set partitions for everything on a FAT partition is through the mount options.

The most common mount option 8in fstab) for FAT partitions is umask, which indicates which permissions are masked (eliminated), so umask=000 gives you full permissions for everyone. There are also dmask and fmask, for directories and files only respectively.

You can also assign a UID and GID (user/group ID) to the partition.

For more info read fstab(5)

I used umask=0000, and this works as I hoped. Thanks to your hint I found a wiki that offered a full 4-digit permissions code, and used that.

I'm still not sure about the security of having a partition (even a non-system one) that is fully rwx for everyone, but now I've got one.

That's where the gid and uid come in...
btw would you mind sharing the link to the wiki - I'm still not 100% comfortable with the fourth digit.