[GRLUG] Firefox on an external drive

[Michael Mol]

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.)

-- 
:wq