Hi,
I have a little and very annoying problem.

I want to mount a partition so that most of the files would be owned by a user, then an ftp dir with special previliges set up, and some of the files having write access for all users.

I can't do it anyhow. Right now i have this line in /etc/fstab:

/dev/hda6 /windows vfat noauto,user,umask=0000

which comes the closest to what i want, but is a huge security risk. The negative sides of this setup is that i have to manually mount the partition every time i login, and that ALL the files have rwx access for all users. And i don't know how to make an ftp dir with different previliges.

If i put auto in /etc/fstab then all the files will be owned by root, which is what i don't want, it will also not allow to execute files.
If i also put exec that still won't solve the problem.
And if i just don't use umask I somehow can't make a file with writable access by all users.

Maybe there's some way i can make a script which would run on startup or login which would mount the partition and set all the needed previliges?

Thanks in advance.

I can be of a little help here, at least tell you what to look for.
I searched for a 'mount-HOWTO' or 'MSDOSFS-HOWTO' but didn't find it - but there is a document in the Linux documentation that explains how you can set ownership of the VFAT partition to a particular user, so only that user, group, etc, +root can access it.

See man mount under

mount options for vfat

uid=x, gid=y

Atle
PS: I assume it is Linux because of the partition names, and the fact that you must be running a LinAMD machine (LinAMD is the PC equivalent of SolSPARC, etc)

Ok, now it is somewhat better, but still there is a problem. I have this line now in /etc/fstab:

/dev/hda6 /windows vfat auto,user,uid=300,gid=300

On load the permissions of most of the files and directories on the partition are rwxr-xr-x, which is probably what i would want to have. But if i need a file with rwxrwxrwx permissions i can't somehow do that. With command chmod +w filename it doesn't change anything. if i remove w access to a file and then do the above command again it only puts the w on the user (rwxr-xr-x) and not the group or for all users.

Is there a way of somehow change that?

P.S. I'm on Red Hat Linux 7.1 on P4 1.5GHz

And thanks again!

Please remember that vfat is an MSDOS single-user filesystem. The multi-user-related manipulations can only be done in the 'Unix-part' - as soon as you are in MSDOS land, you are in single-user-land, and 'groups', 'users' and such have no existence.
I think that means that the answer to the last part is NO!.
But NO in Linux is not always NO ... check out UMSDOS - "Unix on MSDOS" - it will put some control files in the system to give the appearance of a Unix system.
Document everything you do, because I'm not sure anyone has ever thought about all these issues.

Atle