Linux, new hard drive & permissions

[lard bunnys]

OK, so I bought a new 400GB hard drive to use for storage. The drive in question is sdb. I've formatted it as one giant ext3 partition (sdb1), & labeled it "depot".

The "depot" directory is owner=root & group=users (775).
The problem is that in Ubuntu I can't create any directories (as a normal user) inside of depot (sdb1) & can only place data into existing directories (created in Suse). I have a lot of burnt cds full of data that are nearing the end of their "5 year" life span & I would like to sort them onto sdb1 accordingly.

Under Suse everything works fine.

Here is my Suse fstab:

/dev/hda7 / ext3 acl,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/sdb1 /depot ext3 user,acl 1 2
/dev/hda8 /misc ext3 user,acl 1 2
/dev/sda3 /ubuntu/home reiserfs ro,user,acl 1 2
/dev/hda1 /windows/C ntfs ro,user 0 0
/dev/hda5 /windows/G ntfs ro,user 0 0
/dev/hda6 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/sda1 swap swap defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
/dev/hda2 /data1 auto noauto,user 0 0
/dev/hda3 /data2 auto noauto,user 0 0
/dev/sda2 /data3 auto noauto,user 0 0
/dev/sda4 /data4 auto noauto,user 0 0
/dev/dvdrecorder /media/dvdrecorder subfs noauto,fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nosuid,nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy subfs noauto,fs=floppyfss,procuid,nodev,nosuid,sync 0 0
none /subdomain subdomainfs noauto 0 0

& here's Ubuntu's fstab:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/sda2 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/sda3 /home reiserfs defaults 0 2
/dev/sda4 /media/sda4 ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/sdb1 /depot ext3 user 0 2
/dev/sdc1 /media/sdc1 vfat defaults 0 0
/dev/sda1 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hdc /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto 0 0

If anyone could point me in the right directection, it would be mucho appreciated.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Is the regular user in the users group?

 

[Nothinman]

The user mount option just tells mount that regular users can mount/umount the device, you still have to set proper permissions on it.

 

[nweaver]

I would check the User's groups, and also check GID's....Group ID's may be different, so it's not really seeing it as "Users" group, but rather as group XXX or something. I had problems syncing UID's and GID's across intstalls a while back...

 

[silverpig]

I had the same problem with ubuntu when I installed it on my desktop but it was easy to solve. I'm not at home right now so I can't post my fstab, but it involves using a umask= line in the fstab.

Maybe add a rw, umask=0000 in your fstab to see if that works.

 

[Nothinman]

I had the same problem with ubuntu when I installed it on my desktop but it was easy to solve. I'm not at home right now so I can't post my fstab, but it involves using a umask= line in the fstab.

Maybe if the disk was NTFS, FAT, HPFS or UDF...

 

[lard bunnys]

Well, checking /etc/group everything seems ok there.
Should I add uid & gid values to my fstab? Would I use gid=100 or gid=1000?
I'll play around with it some more after work.

 

[Nothinman]

No, you should just fix the permissions on the filesystem itself.

 

[lard bunnys]

To fix it I need to know my mistake, or what's wrong. But I don't.
I'm really not that smart. Honest.

 

[Nothinman]

In most OSes these days there is the ability to define permissions on the filesystem, like ACLs in NTFS. But unlike Windows the default permissons on a filesystem are root only, you have to specifically give users rights to the filesystem. The user, umask, etc options in /etc/fstab are only useful for filesystems that don't support permissions like FAT, UDF, HPFS, etc. You need to use chown to change the owner and possibly chmod to change the mode (rights) if you want.

 

[lard bunnys]

Just an update.
Everything's working now without me changing anything.
I rebooted from Suse into Ubuntu & upon boot up Ubuntu ran a filesytem check on sdb1.
After that everything's working as I want it to.
Go figure.