[vox-tech] NFS mounting a VFAT filesystem - uid and gid issues?

[Marc Elliot Hall]

On Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 04:06:40PM -0700, Jan W wrote:
> Hi Marc:
> 
> I think the permissions on /var/www/tiny is your problem.
> 
> Try chmod 775 (world read and execute) /var/www/tiny so that apache (or
> whatever user/group that apache runs as) can read from your mounted
> directory.

As you can see, that's not going to help: 

  marc at oracle $ sudo chmod -R ugo+r /var/www/tiny
  marc at oracle $ sudo chmod -R o+x /var/www/tiny
  marc at oracle $ ls -la /var/www/tiny/
  total 68
  drwxrwx---    3 nobody   users       32768 Aug 18  2005 ./
  drwxr-xr-x   13 root     root         4096 Aug 16 17:38 ../
  drwxrwx---    3 nobody   users       32768 Aug 16 08:15 data/

Changing ownership results in a similar problem (with a more explicit
error): 

  marc at oracle $ chown marc.webusers /var/www/tiny
  chown: changing ownership of `/var/www/tiny': Operation not permitted

  marc at oracle $ sudo chown marc.webusers /var/www/tiny
  Password:
  chown: changing ownership of `/var/www/tiny': Operation not permitted
 
Because the NFS mounted partition is VFAT rather than EXT3 (like the 
rest of the non-swap filesystems mounted on oracle), Unix permissions
don't apply except as specified at mount time. And, since NFS doesn't
permit modification of uid, gid, and umask parameters, I have to accept
whatever host "tiny" has configured in /etc/fstab...

> Or, you could set apache to run as nobody:users, since that is the
> user/group owner of your mounted directory.

Changing Apache's uid and gid is not an option, as several virtual hosts
and a large number of mod_perl/cgi processes are tied into the current
configuration. 
> 
> HTHO,
> 
> jan

Hey, those ideas were at least worth trying ;-) 

I'm starting to think, though, that what I really need to do is change
the filesystem type from VFAT to EXT3. I was hoping to avoid that :-( 

-- 
Marc Elliot Hall
621 River Moss Drive
St. Peters, MO 63376
www.hallmarc.net