OK, I have dug around the forums, and have played with 1000 different mount commands and smb.conf entries, and still I am missing something. I am unable to mount the drive so that users other than root can write to the /mnt/usb and its subs. And when I share the drive via samba, I am unable to connect to the share as root, therefore I cannot write to the share.

My mount command (latest that I use) is this:
mount -t auto -o users /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb

Unwriteable by ayone other than root. I figured the users group would be able to write to the dir, but no such luck.

Then I samba share this baby...
# A publicly accessible directory, but read only, except for people in
# the "staff" group
[usb-external]
comment = The 20gb External Drive
path = /mnt/usb/
guest ok = yes
read only = no
guest only = yes
create mask = 0666
directory mask = 0777

I have messed with the masks and guest flags, and I may have missed the proper combination. You know how it is after chasing your tail for so long. You forget all that you have actually done, sometimes.

Any ideas? Would love someday to have this baby auto mount and auto share. We lose power anytime someone sneezes in the neighborhood. But alas, the drive never autodetects on boot up either. I have to unplug it and replug, then I can see and mount the drive.

Thanks for any hints or tips.

Skip Hollowell.
Slackware 10.2, paitently waiting for 11.

I believe Slackware 11 is out via bit-torrent already