Re: best practices for an external hard drive that many hosts might use?

["Derek Martin-9" <user=7@nabble.blu.org>]

 On Wed, Nov 21, 2007 at 12:36:40PM -0500, Brendan Kidwell wrote: 
> I have a couple of external hard drives with Firewire and USB 
> connectors on each, and in the last year I've been ridding myself of 
> Windows and OS X computers, to the point where it doesn't make any 
> sense to use NTFS or FAT32 on these disks. 

Why not?  Linux can read and write those filesystems without any 
troulbe these days.  And using those filesystems seems to solve your 
permissions problem rather naturally... 

> Ideally I would like it to behave the same as any FAT32-formatted USB 
> storage device is typically mounted: You plug it in and your desktop 
> automatically mounts it under a folder like "/media", and any user who can 
> access such mounts has FULL access on ALL files in the external device. In 
> other words, I want to dispense with file-level permissions. 

You could mount the disk, and run (as root): 

 # chmod -R 777 <filesystem> 

But you'll need to manually need to ensure that new files you copy to 
the disk get changed to 777 permissions every time you copy a file. 

One might be inclined to suggest that you set the umask of your shell 
to 0 (see the bash manpage if you don't understand what this does), 
but this is inadequate: many programs will create new files with 
restrictive default permissions, which is not affected by umask (other 
than to possibly make it even more restrictive).  Also, when you copy 
existing files, depending on the mechanism you use to copy them, the 
original permissions of the files will likely be copied. 

Thus, this solution is extremely sub-optimal.  But I think your only 
alternative is to use FAT or NTFS. 

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 
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