[GRLUG] Firefox on an external drive

[Michael Mol]

On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 11:37 AM, Bob Kline <bob.kline at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 10:35 PM, Tom Warren <tomewarren+grlug at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> As the user (non-root) can you list the contents of the Filesystem? Are we
>> maybe dealing with an ACL?  Run "getfacl /disk2" before and after you mount
>> the drive and post the output.
>>
>> Tom
>
> Before mounting:
>
> # file: disk2
> # owner: me
> # group: me
> user::rwx
> group:: r-x
> other::r-x
>
> After mounting:
>
> # file: disk2
> # owner: root
> # group: root
> user::rwx
> group::r-x
> other::r-w
>
>
> So the mount process does indeed change
> permissions, but this should not change a
> couple of key things:
>
> 1)  Konqueror works fine.  I can view the
> contents of /disk2 as expected.
>
> 2)  The permissions are 755, so I should be
> able to at least view the contents of disk2
> in any case.
>
> 3) I can view the contents of /disk2 one
> file at a time.  e.g., if I enter file:///disk2/myfile.html
> as the URL to Firefox, the contents are displayed.
> It's only when I enter file:///disk2 that I get a blank
> page.
>
> At this point it does seem that Firefox requires
> some kind of permissions that just aren't there.
> I tried changing "owner" to "me", but nothing
> changed - I still cannot view the contents of /disk2.
>
> I can view the contents of any directory owned
> by root on the primary drive.  Just not /disk2.
>

I'm not sure if enumerating a directory's contents requires read,
execute or both.  Also, what steps did you take to change the owner to
yourself?  Did you use the uid= and gid= mount options, or did you
chown after the mount?

Also try adding the mount to fstab with the requisite options to allow
non-root users to mount it, and see if that fixes it.

It may be worthwhile to file a bug report with your distro's bug
tracker; They'll fix it locally and push the fix up to mainstream.
(Unless it's Debian, in which case they'll just fix it locally; Their
Seamonky codebase has deviated significantly from Firefox.)

-- 
:wq