How to fstab

[Buck2348]

Excellent how-to--it helped me a lot, and I haven't nearly finished studying it.

One question and one observation:

VFAT/NTFS:
umask can be used to set permissions if you wish to change the default.
Syntax is "odd" at first.
To set a permissions of 777, umask=000
to set permissions of 700, umask=077
o= Sets owner. Syntax: must use owned BY USER ID # not name.
g= sets group ownership of mount point. Again syntax is by GROUP ID # not name.

I can't find any reference to this in man mount, to which man fstab refers for details on mounting options. Instead it mentions uid=xxx and gid=xxx to set the owner and group. I don't mount any vfat shares but uid and gid work with smbfs shares. I might have to try out your syntax.

I could not automount at boot my smbfs shares until I found the this fix in the Forums. I hope it will help someone else. I think the problem was related to the fact that I don't use a username and password in the Windows systems. All I had to do was add

username=share,password=

to the options list in the fstab line for these shares.

Thanks again for a great article.

Buck

[~LoKe]

Nice work; very thorough!

[pieroxy]

Hi,

Changing the label for a vfat drive doesn't take the '-s' option. So the line

sudo mlabel -s i:DATA

should read:

sudo mlabel i:DATA

Thanks for the great post.

[aretei]

deleted

[thor918]

I had problems putting the uuid like you had in your example of fstab
however I did find a way that worked for me.

# /dev/sdb
/dev/disk/by-uuid/c4e0ea4c-1806-468e-85fa-1730632e4ee5 /mountpoint ext3 defaults 0 1

if I format the uuid line like this instead it works for me.

[malarky]

How can I mount a windows share that has a space? eg: //server/stupid share name

Ugly, I know, but changing the share name is not an option

[bodhi.zazen]

You have to "escape" the spaces with a \

Like this :

//server/stupid\ share\ name

[mrwilloby]

Make a label:

mke2fs -L <label> <dev>

First of all, great post, very helpful.

I know I should be more responsible and figure out what I'm doing first because I interpreted this section and this code in particular as only making a label on my partition, not as it erasing everything. I lost a few scores of GB, but I think it was all replaceable.

After that I found out there is no way at all to undo a mke2fs command.

Pointing people to tune2fs -L might be helpful. I found that afterwards.

[bodhi.zazen]

I know I should be more responsible and figure out what I'm doing first because I interpreted this section and this code in particular as only making a label on my partition, not as it erasing everything. I lost a few scores of GB, but I think it was all replaceable.

OMG, I am so sorry.

After that I found out there is no way at all to undo a mke2fs command.

Pointing people to tune2fs -L might be helpful. I found that afterwards.

I updated this posting and added a warning re: usage of mke2fs directing people to either tune2fs (as you point out) or e2label.

If you do not feel this is obvious enough, please let me know and I will make further modifications.

[mykalreborn]

hi there! i'm having some troubles with the cds not mounting. this is a previous thread i wrote but since no one answered i asked you too.
i know it's not nice to ask in two places but i really want this problem solved. thank you!