Home directory on a vfat partition
 

I just moved my home directory onto my vfat partition.

There are a number of problems.

First, if I try and start a vncserver, I get:

xauth: error in locking authority file /home/siepmann/.Xauthority

Similarly, if I try and move an email to a different folder (postfix/dovecot), I get a server error, and the following appears in /var/log/maillog:

Jan 12 16:49:01 domain imap(siepmann): link(/home/siepmann/Maildir//tmp/1137084541.P5373Q10M561225.domain.com, /home/siepmann/Maildir//new/1137084541.P5373Q10M561225.domain.com:2,S) failed: Operation not permitted

These things didn't happen before which leads me to believe that the problem is something to do with how Linux mounts my vfat partition...

The line in /etc/fstab is:
/dev/hda1 /home/siepmann vfat defaults,uid=500,gid=500

Any ideas?

Many thanks!

--
Peter Siepmann
Nottingham, UK
http://www.petersiepmann.net

A FAT32 filesystem can not handle linux file permissions and so it isn't a good idea to use it for /home.

It will not work at all. just to mention some limitations:
VFAT only has support to 8.3 naming convention.
VFAT does not support links (both, symbolic and hard)
VFAT supports only 255 entries by directory.

regards,

I was afraid that would be the answer! Is there any way of converting VFAT to ext3?

Thanks a lot!

Peter

it's called reformat and reinstall.

Yup, OK. Thanks!

I downsized my VFAT partition with a view to making the free space into a new ext3 partition:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 1 5088 40869328+ c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hda2 * 9180 9192 104422+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 9193 9205 104422+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda4 9206 14593 43279110 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 9206 14593 43279078+ 8e Linux LVM

How can I create a new parition (5089-9179)?

Thanks!

Peter

Use parted or fdisk or something like that! I prefer parted:

http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/parted.html

I dunno what distro your using cause parted comes with some of them! But look for it/download it and go from there!

-David

You can not create an additional primary partition because you already have four.
You can not create a logical partition with that space because it is not in the extended partition. I do not think parted can handle moving the entire extended partition.

Do you need a seperate /home? It might be possible to mount your old home to another mount point and then copy the files back to your /home/user (I assume back to the LVM) with out reinstalling. I can not say what it will take to manually go through all of the files in your home to change the permissions back.