[COLUG] read/write windows server permissions: need some ideas

[Brian Miller]

On Wednesday 27 December 2006 4:09 pm, charles morrison wrote:
> I am having difficulty getting read/write permissions set on files on a
> windows NT4 server.
>
> I am running Kubuntu Dapper and connected to a Windows NT4 server where
> I have a database. The other users of the database are running windows
> clients. The client software is windows based, so I am running it under
> WINE on my laptop.
>
> The client side program works well on my laptop and works with the data
> base if it resides on the laptop, but will not connect when trying to
> attach over the network.
>
> The problem appears to be a permission problem, since I have read/write
> permission problems just saving an Open Office document. The permissions
> I see when writing an OO document are -rw-r--r-- and gives an error of:
> "General Input/output error" while attempting the save. Open Office
> works great otherwise.
>
> My mount point is /media/alidata to the server and the fstab entry is:
>
This sounds like a group permissions sort of issue.  What group is able to 
write to the Windows share?  Do you have an equivalent group on your Linux 
system?  I'm not sure how the group-to-group mapping needs to be set up, but 
that is where I would look.

If you can save files generally on the Windows server, just not when running 
an application, then I would look at changing your primary group on the Linux 
system, since a file saved by an application will want to use the primary 
group of the user, not necessarily the group that has write permissions in 
the directory.

Windows doesn't particularly care about owner permissions.  It doesn't care 
who originally wrote the file or who owns it.  What matters are the access 
permissions applied to the file.  An owner can end up having NO access to a 
file, while members of some group could have full access to it.

You might also look at changing your umask (which should be setable 
in /etc/profile) to 002, so that groups will have rw permissions to files.