[vox-tech] FSTAB Questions

[Jonathan Stickel]

Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> On Tue 17 Feb 04,  9:34 AM, Robert G. Scofield <rscofield@afes.com> said:
> 
...

>>/dev/hda1            /mnt/windows         vfat       umask=0               0 0

...
> 
>>Will I screw something up with my simple umask=0?
> 
> 
> no, i don't believe so.
> 
> to be honest, i'm not sure what umask=0 does for you.  linux already
> knows how to access vfat.  it already knows that there are no
> permissions on vfat.  i never used this option on any dual boot i've
> ever owned.
> 
> maybe someone can explain why it's necessary to set a umask for a vfat
> filesystem?
> 
I'm still fairly ignorant myself about mounting stuff, but I've used 
umask=0000 for my fat32 partitions (per suggestion of someone at an 
installfest).  It sets the permissions for all files to r-w-x for 
everybody.  Non-root users can then read, write, and execute all the 
files on the partition.  Since the partition is mounted as root, and 
fat32 doesn't really do file ownership, all the files and permissions 
are set to root when it gets mounted automatically during boot.  So 
without the umask entry, no one except root can write to the drive.

It seems to me there should be a better way to do this.  Perhaps use the 
"noauto,owner,rw" options like a cdrom so that the partition belongs to 
the mounting user.  But the user then has to mount it manually at some 
point.  I haven't tried this yet myself.

Jonathan