NTFS/USB questions

[wmrobins]

I, like a number of other people here, have had problems getting my NTFS external drive usable.

I was able to get it to automount and become readable by adding "umask=0222" to the
/dev/sda1 /media/USB\040Drive auto users,atime,auto,rw,dev,exec,suid 0 0 line in my fstab file. But it's still not writable.

So.... Before I proceed I'd like to know a couple of things.

Is the "auto" option going to select the NTFS-3g driver or does NTFS-3g need to be specified explicitly?

And, (pardon me if my noobie is showing), if NTFS 3g is used under the "auto" option should I select a different umask, like 0777? I was thinking of just trying this but I'm afraid of nuking my hard drive!

Thanks in advance,

wmrobins

[SheeEttin]

Re: NTFS/USB questions

I believe NTFS-3g is used as the NTFS filesystem interface/driver/whatever, but I am nowhere near familiar with how that works.
Anyway, the "auto" is for automatic filesystem detection--normally, it guesses correctly, but to be safe, you might want to put "ntfs" there.

On the umask, I lifted this from the man page for chmod:

A numeric mode is from one to four octal digits (0-7), derived by adding up the bits with values 4, 2, and 1. Any
omitted digits are assumed to be leading zeros. The first digit selects the set user ID (4) and set group ID (2)
and sticky (1) attributes. The second digit selects permissions for the user who owns the file: read (4), write
(2), and execute (1); the third selects permissions for other users in the file’s group, with the same values; and
the fourth for other users not in the file’s group, with the same values.

In short, I recommend 0661 if you won't be executing things and don't want unauthorized users writing to it, 0771 for execution/same, or, for a usual desktop, just go with 0777. It's the most open, but the security guy in me says "bad idea".

And by the way, you might want to eliminate the space from the mount point somehow. Some things might not interpret it correctly (space-delimited arguments).