Samba sharing a FAT32 external HD

[ZIYAD A. M. AL-BATLY]

On Sat, 2005-06-18 at 12:11 -0400, Ben Novack wrote:
> On 6/18/05, ZIYAD A. M. AL-BATLY <zamb at saudi.net.sa> wrote:
> > On Fri, 2005-06-17 at 21:29 -0400, Ben Novack wrote:
> > > On 6/17/05, Ben Novack <bennovack at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > I've got an external USB2 hard drive formatted as FAT32 that contains,
> > > > among other things, all of my music; I want the other systems on my
> > > > network (specifically, a Mac PowerBook) to have unrestricted
> > > > read/write access to it. Sharing my home directory works fine; the
> > > > external drive shows up when browsing the network, but neither XP nor
> > > > the PB can actually view it. Is there a way to get it properly shared
> > > > without reformatting it into something more Unixy - something I very
> > > > much want to avoid, since I frequently use it on XP systems?
> > > >
> > > > (The HD's plugged into a Hoary desktop, for the record.)
> > >
> > > Something else that just came up as I was investigating a workaround:
> > > If I copy the library to the shared folder on my hard drive, the Mac
> > > can't use it as its library folder because it lacks write permissions.
> > > Is there a way I can change its contents, recursively down the tree,
> > > to be rwx for everyone?
> > >
> > To change the permission recursively pass the "-R" option to
> > "chmod" (bare the security risk!  Everyone will have read/write
> > permissions):
> >   chmod -R a+rwX /path/to/directory
> > 
> > 
> > And about your original problem, to fix it you need to mount your drive
> > with the "dmask=000,fmask=111" options.  In "/etc/fstab" add the line:
> >   /dev/sda1  /media/sda1  auto  defaults,noauto,users,dmask=000,fmask=111
> > 
> > (In the above, I'm assuming that your USB HDD is "/dev/sda" and it has
> > only one partition.  Create the directory "/media/sda1" if needed.
> > Configure SAMBA to share "/media/sda1".  Again: Bare the security risks
> > imposed by such actions!).
> > 
> > If you need anything else, just ask here again.
> > Ziyad.
> > 
> 
> Well, right now the external drive isn't mounting with fstab; it just
> gets automounted as a USB drive. If I switch to fstab'ing it, will I
> still be able to remove and reattach it at will? Will automount simply
> ignore a device listed in fstab?
It would still work¹.  Auto mounting devices is done by “pmount”¹.
Here's a quote from the manual:
  The mount will succeed if all of the following conditions are met:
      * device is a block device in /dev/
      * device is not in /etc/fstab (if it is, pmount executes mount
        device as the calling user to handle this transparently)
      * device is not already mounted according to /etc/mtab
        and /proc/mounts
      * if the mount point already exists, there is no device already
        mounted at it and the  directory is empty
      * device is removable (USB or FireWire device,
        or /sys/block/drive/removable is 1)
      * device is not locked

(point #2 is the one important to our discussion.)


There's one catch:  If you attached your USB HDD and it got assigned a
device name other than “/dev/sda”.  I've read that you could ensure that
would not happen if you fiddled with “udev” configuration but I don't
know how.

In general, every time you connect your USB HDD it will be assigned the
first “/dev/sd?” device available and that would be “/dev/sda” if you
don't have other external hot-plugged devices.

Just give it a try.  If it didn't work for you, you can always go back
by removing (or commenting out) that line.

Notes:
     1. Under Hoary “5.04” (and maybe Breezy “5.10” and to be released
        hopefully in two or three months).  Warty “4.10” is another
        story (it doesn't have “pmount” for starter).


Ziyad.