[GLLUG] Permissions on a FAT32 volume?

[Marr]

On Monday 11 June 2007 10:15am, Mike Szumlinski wrote:
> This is probably so simple, but I have been helping some friends get
> fiber channel up and working on their AutoDesk Smoke system for some
> testing and they are able to see a FAT32 LUN with no problem, but
> only root has permission to write to it.  We basically want to give
> open access to the drive to any user on the system.  Am I missing
> something in the fstab?  I know FAT32 doesn't support permissions, so
> my thought was that it should actually just allow full read/write by
> all users.
>
> Any ideas or things to look for?

Hi Mike,

I have a FAT32 partition on a USB flash RAM drive which is used as my 
incremental (hourly) backup ('IBU') device under Linux.

My 'fstab' entry looks like this:

   /dev/sdb1   /ibu   auto   umask=000,rw,user,noauto   0   0

If I manually mount the drive, I use a command like this:

   mount -t vfat -o umask=000,rw,user,noauto /dev/sdb1 /ibu

An ordinary (non-'root') user can write to the drive just fine (despite the 
fact that most of my writes are done by a 'cron' job for the 'root' user).

See 'man mount' for the details. Pay special attention to the 'umask' 
and 'user' options.

HTH.

Bill Marr