[vox-tech] vfat and permissions - anyone seen this before?

[Ken Bloom]

I have a vfat partition mounted as follows, and it has some permissions 
wierdness
#from /etc/fstab
/dev/hda6 /home/bloom/mydocs vfat 
iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=077,gid=501,codepage=850,noexec,uid=501 0 0

When I first set it up, the directories on the partition had the 
following permissions: (the files which I omitted using grep all had 
permissions: 0700)
drwx------    3 bloom    bloom        4096 Mar  1 17:03 Adobe/
drwx------    3 bloom    bloom        4096 Dec  2 15:28 AFI/
drwx------    2 bloom    bloom        4096 Jan  6 15:13 Birkat/
drwx------    2 bloom    bloom        4096 Jan 18 00:28 coopapp/
drwx------    4 bloom    bloom        4096 Jul 24  2001 Devices/
drwx------    2 bloom    bloom        4096 Jul  8  2001 Documentation/
drwx------   12 bloom    bloom        4096 Mar 11 08:32 Downloads/
drwx------    3 bloom    bloom        4096 Jul  9  2001 Fax/
drwx------    4 bloom    bloom        4096 Jan 14 13:13 Finances/
drwx------    4 bloom    bloom        4096 Jul  8  2001 Hack/
drwx------    2 bloom    bloom        4096 Jan  1 16:24 kyack/
drwx------    7 bloom    bloom        4096 Mar  1 17:05 MP3s/
dr-x------    3 bloom    bloom        4096 Mar 11 13:43 My Pictures/
dr-x------    3 bloom    bloom        4096 Mar  1 16:54 Pictures/
drwx------   16 bloom    bloom        4096 Oct  7 16:07 Programming/
drwx------    8 bloom    bloom        4096 Jan 16 18:05 School Work/

I was wondering why the kernel chose for this to happen, and was going 
to make that the major question of my post. The permissions had effect, 
so it wasn't just a display bug (I really was not allowed to copy files 
into the two pictures directories, for example, but I was able to copy 
files into the others)

Then I decided to try to chmod the two folders with `chmod +x Pictures 
'My Pictures'`. I expected it to spit out an error message saying that I 
couldn't do that because it was a vfat partition. Surprisingly it 
worked. My directory listing is now
drwx------    3 bloom    bloom        4096 Mar  1 17:03 Adobe/
drwx------    3 bloom    bloom        4096 Dec  2 15:28 Aggies for Israel/
drwx------    2 bloom    bloom        4096 Jan  6 15:13 Birkat/
drwx------    2 bloom    bloom        4096 Jan 18 00:28 coopapp/
drwx------    4 bloom    bloom        4096 Jul 24  2001 Devices/
drwx------    2 bloom    bloom        4096 Jul  8  2001 Documentation/
drwx------   12 bloom    bloom        4096 Mar 11 08:32 Downloads/
drwx------    3 bloom    bloom        4096 Jul  9  2001 Fax/
drwx------    4 bloom    bloom        4096 Jan 14 13:13 Finances/
drwx------    4 bloom    bloom        4096 Jul  8  2001 Hack/
drwx------    2 bloom    bloom        4096 Jan  1 16:24 kyack/
drwx------    7 bloom    bloom        4096 Mar  1 17:05 MP3s/
drwx------    3 bloom    bloom        4096 Mar 11 13:43 My Pictures/
drwx------    3 bloom    bloom        4096 Mar  1 16:54 Pictures/
drwx------   16 bloom    bloom        4096 Oct  7 16:07 Programming/
drwx------    8 bloom    bloom        4096 Jan 16 18:05 School Work/

I decided to see whether rebooting the computer would have any effect 
(perhaps the permissions I assigned were cached in RAM somewhere.) When 
I rebooted, the permissions were the same (everything was 0700).

So here are my questions:

Why did the system originally decide that the two pictures folders 
should not be writable?
What did the system change when I ran the chmod command?

I'm using kernel 2.4.18-4mdk.
I swear I'm not using UMSDOS.