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

[Derek Martin]

On Mon, Nov 26, 2007 at 11:07:46AM -0500, Brendan Kidwell wrote:
> It appears that it is simply impossible, in Linux, to do what I want to do
> using a Linux-native filesystem as native filesystems are always mounted
> with normal Unix permissions enabled. 
[...]
> It feels weird to be using a reverse-engineered proprietary filesystem
> because the drivers for the native filesystem don't satisfy a rather simple
> requirement of disabling permissions and having the whole mounted filesystem
> owned by the user that mounted it. 

So, the difference is that Unix was designed almost 40 years ago, with
security in mind.  Windows was designed only 20 years ago, without
security tacked on as an afterthought.  Unfortunately, in neither case
did anyone forsee being able to unplug your hard drive and plug it
into various systems.  :)

I think I thought of a way to do it though... use Samba.  Requires
root access to the machine though, and it's been so long since I've
messed with samba, I'm not totally sure it would work.  It should be
possible though... Samba itself runs as root (or used to, I'm not even
sure about that anymore) so should have no problems accessing the
files.  Then you just need to tell it to share the whole hard drive as
a public share with read/write access, and re-mount it someplace else.
I think that would work.  I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm
wrong though. ;-)

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