Would SAMBA work in this situation

[DrewSteele]

I currently am running a WinXP system and have RH9 running as a file server using SAMBA. I have had great difficulty getting the HD to work because it will not allow me to change permissions (it is fat32 and will only allow read and copy.....no write capability). I was wondering if I changed the HD from fat32 to say ext2 or ext3, if I would still be able to access the drive with a Windows system. It seems as though Linux is not very fond of fat32 and I think this may solve my problems. Thanks for your time in advance, Drew.

[Jo.Mo.]

yes, you can reformat your drive and still have access to it thru your XP machine. It really doesn't matter what the local format of the drive is, and it's more secure if you switch to a permission file system on your SAMBA server.

[DrewSteele]

So what would I have to change the line in my fstab to? It is currently as follows:

/dev/hdb1 /Files vfat users,defaults,umask=000 0 0

Would it be something similar to this?:

/dev/hdb1 /Files ext3 defaults,noatime 1 1

I am going to use Partition Magic to change the partition from fat32 - ext3. I would like to do a fresh format of the drive, but I already have files on the drive and have no place to move them to. Also, just to make sure, I will be able to access this drive on a WinXP machine? I want to be able to read, write, and copy from this drive. Is there anything special that I should have to do to the Samba server to get it to function correctly?

[Edit] After using my brain, I remembered that PM will not allow you to change the format from fat32 - ext3. I therefore am going to have to take the tedious task of creating a separate drive with PM and resizing the current drive, formatting it, and then transfering as many files over as possible. I will repeat this process until I finally have all the files transferred across to the new drive and have one complete drive at 80 Gb. Ain't life a biatch.

[DMR]

Hmm, actually- Linux plays very nicely with FAT32 partitions. Perhaps you were trying to change permissions on the /Files directory while the FAT32 partition was mounted there? If so, that won't work; you need to unmount the partition before you can change the Linux permissions of the directory. Aside from that, your "umask" settings in fstab are correct assuming that you want everyone to have full access to the partition.

I'm sharing a FAT32 partition with Samba; here's my fstab line and the stanza from smb.conf:/dev/hde3 /mnt/windata vfat defaults,umask=000 0 0
[windata]
comment = FAT32 share on Penguinbox
path = /mnt/windata
read only = No
create mask = 0664
directory mask = 0775
browseable = Yes
writeable = Yes

[DrewSteele]

If you look at my first post dealing with Samba, you will see that I am confused as to what the situation may be and was trying something different. The link is as follows:

http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=108081

I did try to unmount the drive, but it continues to say tthis:

umount: /Files: device is busy

I thought perhaps that I had barked up the wrong tree and was trying something new. I am so frustrated with this machine right now that I am about ready to just give up on it. Any insight you can provide would be appreciated. Thanks, Drew.

[DMR]

Originally posted by DrewSteele

umount: /Files: device is busy As a few of us mentioned in your other post, that error means that you are accessing that directory in some way. We described a few possible culprits, but it could be something else. You'll have to determine that on your own.

[DrewSteele]

What I don't understand is what is accessing the drive? I have turned off the WinXP computer, unattached the Linux machine from the router, and have made sure that nothing is running that could possibly access the drive, yet I still can't get the drive to unmount. It is as though something hardware wise is not allowing access to the drive. The only other thing that I think it could possibly be is something to do with using Partition Magic to change the partition from NTFS to fat32. I am so frustrated. I think I am just possibly going to try the switch everything over to a new partition and see if I can gain access to its permissions.

[Edit] - I don't know if it was using Partition Magic to create another partition on the HD that did it, but I rebooted and am now able to unmount the drive and I believe I have the permissions correct now. I still haven't been able to write to it from my XP box as of yet though. I know that on the Samba side of it that the users are created in all lowercase. Should the user on the XP side be all lower case as well (is this process case sensitive)? After running ls -la at the command prompt, I got the following:

drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Jul 29 14:40 .
drwxr-xr-x 23 root root 4096 Aug 14 00:01 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 1 2000 cdrom
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 16384 Dec 31 1969 Files_HD
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 1 2000 floppy

I think all I need now is a little help figuring out what's up with my user permissions. I have all my windows logins, root, and my login on the Linux_Box designated as a group (home). I changed the properties on the HD as the file group to 'home' and left the owner as 'root'. Is there something that I am not doing correctly?

[DrewSteele]

I started playing around and realized that the HD has permissions set for my WinXP login to write, but all the files and folders after the root directory are still assigned to 'root'. How can I change all the permissions of the sub-folders of HD without having to change each individually?

[BOFH]

Originally posted by DrewSteele
What I don't understand is what is accessing the drive? I have turned off the WinXP computer, unattached the Linux machine from the router, and have made sure that nothing is running that could possibly access the drive, yet I still can't get the drive to unmount. It is as though something hardware wise is not allowing access to the drive. The only other thing that I think it could possibly be is something to do with using Partition Magic to change the partition from NTFS to fat32. I am so frustrated. I think I am just possibly going to try the switch everything over to a new partition and see if I can gain access to its permissions.

[Edit] - I don't know if it was using Partition Magic to create another partition on the HD that did it, but I rebooted and am now able to unmount the drive and I believe I have the permissions correct now. I still haven't been able to write to it from my XP box as of yet though. I know that on the Samba side of it that the users are created in all lowercase. Should the user on the XP side be all lower case as well (is this process case sensitive)? After running ls -la at the command prompt, I got the following:

drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Jul 29 14:40 .
drwxr-xr-x 23 root root 4096 Aug 14 00:01 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 1 2000 cdrom
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 16384 Dec 31 1969 Files_HD
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 1 2000 floppy

I think all I need now is a little help figuring out what's up with my user permissions. I have all my windows logins, root, and my login on the Linux_Box designated as a group (home). I changed the properties on the HD as the file group to 'home' and left the owner as 'root'. Is there something that I am not doing correctly?
su
yourpasswordhere
chown -r username /your/folder;chmod 775 /your/folder