NTFS permissions for other users

[japettyjohn]

I have secondary SATA drive in my machine with NTFS on it (from use with Windows Vista). I have had this mounted with FUSE with no issues. But now I'm moving my MySQL data dir onto so I need another user to have read/write to it, but no mounts options I've tried as root have changed anything on the permissions which don't allow non-owners to read/write anything.

The permissions in the mount are:
drwx------ 1 ic ic for directories, -rw------- for files.

The entry in /proc/mounts shows:

/dev/sdc1/ /mnt/big fuseblk rw,relatime,user_id=0,grou_id=0,default_permission s,allow_other,blksize=4096 0 0

I've tried the -o umask=0 and 0222 options but it always mounts exactly the same.

I'm using Fedora 16 with the latest updates as of 10 April.

Any suggestions are welcome.

- James

[jpollard]

I didn't think NTFS supported more than one user.

If you are going to be using this disk for MySQL data, it really really should be a native filesystem. Any of them would work better than NTFS, if nothing but avoiding the fragmentation problems.

I suggest Ext4 as the most stable large capable filesystem at the present time.

[Doug G]

Do you have user_allow_other in your /etc/fuse.conf file?

[jpollard]

That only allows non-root to mount the thing, not concurrent access.

You can get concurrent access, but only by opening up either group or world access... and that defeats the purpose of security as far as a database goes (also needs "allow_other" for the fuse configuration)

I don't use this, as there is a lot of security issues here.

[Gareth Jones]

According to "man mount.ntfs-3g", you can create a mapping between Linux and Windows user IDs.

I don't use NTFS (no Windows installed), but man-pages for the NTFS-3g commands might help.

[japettyjohn]

Thanks for all the replies, very appreciated.

As to the whole NTFS is a bad idea - I couldn't agree more, this is local database that is not used by others. Just happens to be I've gotten it up to 40gigs utilized and had to move it off my primary drive which ran out of space. And it's a single file InnoDB so none of the space can be reclaimed short of a dump and reload.

As to the permissions into NTFS itself - I don't know why I can't get this to mount without FUSE butting in. While all the options that I need to use are obviously there per the manual nothing takes effect when I issue the commands. I did uncomment user_allow_other after it was mentioned. Made no change.

I'm doing a workaround right now by moving the files again to another drive I have some free space off with a new ext 4 partition (draw being I have around 10 gigs free instead of 700gigs and the drive only added for temp files and swap - definitely not an ideal disk to have the source data on).

[jpollard]

NTFS is implemented in userspace. FUSE is used to implement NTFS, so FUSE configurations have to get involved.

[Gareth Jones]

Originally Posted by jpollard

NTFS is implemented in userspace.

Exactly.

There is an in-kernel NTFS driver, but it's read-only by default (its write capabilities are limited and unsafe). Having the implementation in user-space also allows greater flexibility, such as the user-mapping I mentioned.

[jpollard]

As I recall, the in-kernel version was for an old version of NTFS, and never got the journaling fully compatible, leading to the failures in the I/O when switching back and forth with Windows.

It also avoids potential MS lawsuits.