ownership / permissions on a fat32 drive

[Alexander Dalloz]

Am Di, den 06.01.2004 schrieb Trevor Smith um 03:20:
> Man, I'm confused.
> 
> I have a fat32 partition that I use to share info between my Win2k and FC1 
> installations on one machine. I run MySQL to keep track of some work related 
> stats. I moved my MySQL data to the fat32 partition and pointed both the 
> Win2k and linux versions of MySQL to the right directory.
> 
> Things worked fine in Windows but not so well in linux. So I changed the owner 
> of the fat32 drive to "mysql". I did this with this line in fstab:
> 
> /dev/hda5		/mnt/win2k		vfat	defaults,users,exec,dev,suid,uid=27,gid=27	0 0
> 
> This seemed to make linux happy and now I can access the files and write new 
> data with MySQL in linux and Win2k.
> 
> BUT, now linux doesn't want me to write files to that partition as a regular 
> user. Only MySQL and root can write to it, apparently.
> 
> Any pointers on somewhere I can read some basics that will teach me what I 
> *SHOULD* be doing regarding permissions/ownership on that partition? If 
> someone else owns it, MySQL can't write to it. If MySQL owns it, I have to 
> run su or log in as root to write to it. Can't we all just get along?!?

You just face the limits of FAT32 under Linux.

If you really want to write as a normal user inside the mysql directory
on the windows partition you should think over adding a special
maintaining user and add him to the mysql group. Become this new user
every time you think you need to maintain anything with "su -
mysqladmin" (if mysqladmin is the name of this user).

Again, it is no fault or missing capability of Fedora GNU/Linux that
FAT32/vfat mounted partitions behave like you see. Handling this is
always a kind of "hack" as vfat is not a native Linux filesystem.

Alexander


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Alexander Dalloz | Enger, Germany
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