Shared Windows/Linux Drive Problems

[Leo Cacciari]

Il giorno gio, 05/01/2006 alle 07.54 +0000, Paul Sladen ha scritto:
> On Wed, 4 Jan 2006, 'Forum Post wrote:
> > My problem is a bit more tricky: I'd like to mount my vfat (shared with
> > xp) as /home
> 
> Short-answer:  VFAT does not have the necessary capabilities/permissions/
> user-support to mount as '/home'.
> 
> Long-answer:  It is a really *bad* idea.  So bad that the installer now has
> a sanity to check to stop this happening, because people get confused when
> they can't log in as a result!
> 
> Just create a symlink/shortcut from:
> 
>   ~/files
> 
> to:
> 
>   /media/hda7
> 

Hi,
  In setting /home to be a vfat partition the basic problem is that, as
you said, vfat has no notion of file's ownership or permission. This
leads to the fact that all file and directory in a vfat partition have
the same ownership and the same permission (even though the permissions
could be made different for files and directories).

  If you have only one user, this is not a problem, just mount the
filesystem with that user's uid and gid as /home/username. Even better,
mount it as /media/something and put in that user's home directory a
link by executing

$~: ln -s /media/whatever dosfiles

as the given user.

 What if you have two users mary and peter?

 Well, you could do something like this:

$~: sudo addgroup --system dos-users
$~: for user in mary peter; do sudo adduser $user dos-users; done

 Then, as I said in a previous post, mount your vfat partition as
belonging to group dos-users and giving read/write permissions to users
in the dos-users group. As I understand your solution, you propose to do
the following:

$~: for user in mary peter; do
> sudo mkdir /media/whatever/$user-files
> sudo --user $user ln -s /media/whatever/$user-files /home/$user/files
> done

 But maybe I haven't understood your solution afterall, because this
will not realy solve the security problem: peter could still access
mary's files both in reading and writing. 

 This leads me to a question: is the problem solvable? i.e. is there a
way to ensure that mary can not access peter's files nor peter mary's?
In any case, your solution still beats having /dev/hda7 as /home by a
very long way :)



-- 
Leo "TheHobbit"

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