SELinux enforcing, an external ntfs-3g mount, Samba and Fedora 8

[Craig White]

On Wed, 2007-12-12 at 12:31 +1030, Tim wrote:
> Craig White:
> >>> Mount the disk with uid/gid that you want. 
>  
> Tim:
> >> Without some sort of additional user mapping between which user is which
> >> on Windows versus Linux, I can't see how you could avoid that.
> 
> Craig White:
> > I don't understand your point.
> > 
> > I know that a fat/vfat mount doesn't understand posix attributes and
> > they cannot be stored on the filesystem so the uid/gid is declared at
> > the time of mounting (or if undeclared, root:root because only root can
> > mount the filesystem unless designated otherwise, i.e. by hal or within
> > fstab).
> 
> Ownership, not permissions.
> 
> On Windows, users Tim, Fred, and Barney save their files, and their
> files are owned by themselves, with the Windows filing system knowing
> the association between files and particular users.
> 
> Linux uses a different user identifier system.  It can tell that *those*
> Windows files are owned by three different people.  But without some
> mapping that says user 500 on Linux is Tim, and user X on Windows is the
> same Tim, and so on for the other users, there isn't a way for each
> users files to be owned by the same users on both systems.
----
I don't have an NTFS drive that I'm willing to connect up just for
experimentation but OP clearly believes that all files on ntfs-3g mount
were listed as root:root and I have no reason to dispute, that has
always been my experience with vfat mounts.

Thus the concept of 'users' and 'mapping', though intriguing, would be
rather pointless for an NTFS filesystem mounted by ntfs-3g
----
> Dismounting and remounting the drive with the next user owning all the
> files is a mess, and useless for multi-user systems where there actually
> are multiple users using it at the same time.
----
Hence my suggestion that using an NTFS filesystem mounted by ntfs-3g was
simply a temporary solution and not a method for continued operation.
----
> Removable media is a bigger pain.  You can plug it into systems which
> have completely different users.
----
depending of course, how it is mounted. Yes if mounted by hal, no if
mounted by fstab and of course, a filesystem that supports posix
attributes.

Craig