Re: sharing one r/w unix filesystem between different machines and users

On Fri, 26 Aug 2011 08:41:35 +0200
Christoph Groth <cwg@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

"Robert Blair Mason Jr." <rbmj@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Christoph Groth <cwg@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

Will something like the following work? This works on any filesystem
using standard unix permissions (such as ext*, ufs, reiserfs*,
btrfs, etc.)

Suppose your filesystem is mounted on /media/usb0.

# chmod -R a+rwx /media/usb0

This does, however, seem the Wrong Way To Do It, as it will not work
for files created after issuing the command.

That's the point. If user A creates some directory, and user B (who
has a different uid on his machine) wants to delete a file in this
directory, user B will have first to become root and override the
permissions. This is an unnecessary hassle and requires the user in
question to be fairly technical. And it won't work if the user is
unable to become root.

Unfortunately, there isn't an elegant way to do this. It seems like
it should be an option to mount (something like ignoreperms).
Looking at the internet, it appears that OSX has a mount option to
do this:

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man8/mount.8.html
(search for 'noowners')

This option does not appear to exist on Linux or BSD, however.

Thanks, I've been looking for something like this (though an OSX
solution doesn't help me). I really wonder why no one has ever fixed
this issue for Linux -- probably everybody is happy simply using FAT
and NTFS on shared removable media. And their importance is fading
anyway.


I understand OSX doesn't help anyone here... perhaps someone could
request an implementation of this command in the mount source code?
It seems simple - just check if the filesystem has noowners set and if
so, instead of fetching permissions from disk, return -rwxrwxrwx. But
these things are never as simple as they seem...

--
rbmj


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