[GRLUG] Firefox on an external drive

Tom Warren tomewarren+grlug at gmail.com
Sun May 17 12:55:51 EDT 2009


On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 12:28 PM, Bob Kline <bob.kline at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 12:17 PM, Michael Mol <mikemol at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Bob Kline <bob.kline at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 10:44 PM, Michael Mol <mikemol at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >> On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 10:43 AM, Bob Kline <bob.kline at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >> > 755  root root
>> >> >
>> >> > I changed the owner to myself, and
>> >> > nothing changes.
>> >> >
>> >> > But then, I can look at any other directory
>> >> > in root with similar permissions.  Just not the
>> >> > external drive.
>> >>
>> >> When you mount something, the mount permissions override that of the
>> >> mount point.  Try setting the user and permissions for the mount as
>> >> part your parameters to the mount command.
>> >
>> > Would that be any different than just setting
>> > them afterwards?
>> >
>> > Anyway, I tried the mount as:
>> >
>> > mount -t ext3 -o owner,group /dev/sdb7 /disk2
>> >
>> > I see the same behavior as before:  I can view
>> > items within /disk2, but not the contents of /disk2.
>> >
>> > And of course the contents of any directory on
>> > the primary drive.
>> >
>>
>> In a perfect and intuitive world with perfect and intuitive software?
>> No.  At this point, I'm trying to exhaust all possible options,
>> keeping in mind the different systems involved and where there might
>> be failures in their interaction.
>>
>> Try setting the owner and group of the mount by uid and gid
>> respectively, rather than by name.
>>
>> If that doesn't work, try adding the mount to fstab with the options
>> "user,noauto,exec".  Then, as the user you want to have access to the
>> data, try "mount /disk2", and see if Firefox can see the directory
>> contents.
>>
>> If *that* doesn't work, then it's probably not a permissions issue at
>> all; Something in Firefox might be disallowing enumeration of mount
>> point roots as a security feature.  You'd have to dig through
>> about:config to find it, if it's configurable.
>>
>> Another observation: Since this is an external disk, it might be
>> worthwhile for you to use the persistent-naming schemes that seem to
>> be part of udev now; Take a look under /dev/disk, and see if any of
>> those symlinks device nodes will continue to refer to the disk you
>> want to access under circumstances which change the device-devicenode
>> mapping. (Such as, for example, if you were to add a SATA disk; the
>> external USB or firewire disks would get moved to sdc or sdd, and the
>> SATA disk would be sdb.)
>>
>>
>
> Re "all possible options,"   I'll play around
> with this some over time.   I suppose Firefox
> could be doing this on purpose, and it might
> be stated so in some documentation.  As far
> as I can see,  the fact that konqueror works
> and Firefox doesn't suggests as much.
>
> I'll be back if anything changes.
>
> BTW, anyone else see this same phenomena?
>
>    -- Bob
>
>
>
>
>
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other::r-w

That's the key to your problem, a directory needs execute permission for the
user to list the contents of the directory. I am not sure how Konqueror is
getting around this (part of the root group maybe?), once you set that to
r-x I bet Firefox will be able to list the contents of the directory.


Tom


--
Tom Warren                                           tomewarren at gmail.com
meijer ITS Technical Engineer - Storage   Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
These opinions are mine and not necessarily those of my employer, meijer
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