samba - Apr 2008 - Maxtor NAS share problem

I have a network accessible (192.168.2.97) Maxtor Shared Storage drive 
that I want to use to backup the Linux (Slackware) systems on my private 
LAN. I can "smbmount" the drive okay on my Linux systems, but when I
try
and use rsync to do a backup rsync fails with a message about failing to 
change owner.

Digging a little deeper into the problem I find that the 
directories/files on the share all look something like the following

drwxr-xr-x  1 35000 root       0 2008-02-12 15:21 ArchiveOnLinux
drwxrwxrwx  1 35003 root       0 2008-04-22 01:01 Public
-rwxrw-rw-  1 35000 root 1127239 2008-02-28 11:28 gw_rn_vp_grey.pdf

which ISN'T the user (or group) I would have expected it to be mounted 
as. (I've done a chmod u+s /usr/bin/smbmnt to allow users to mount the 
share and I expected that the share would have the same owner as the 
user that mounted it.)

I've also found that I can't change ALL permissions ALL the time on the 
share's directories and files. I can remove group and world privileges 
from a file (which are remembered after a umount and remount) but I 
cannot restore them (even as root). Only the owner privileges are 
consistently changeable.

Basically, ALL I want to do is to be able to use the drive as a backup 
that will maintain the same permissions, user, group, etc., as the 
original files AND I want the files visible from both my Linux AND 
Windows systems (because I need to use Nero on a Windows machine to do 
the backups). Can someone help me figure out how to do this correctly?

Thanks,

Rick Johnson

root is owing the files because the user root mounted the share.  if you 
want to support unix file ownership in your rsync you should use NFS if 
the unit supports that.  to change the group ownership, pass the -o 
gid=some_group on your mount -t cifs command.  you can also use uid= and 
to use both, -o uid=someone,gid=somegroup

Rick Johnson wrote:
> I have a network accessible (192.168.2.97) Maxtor Shared Storage drive 
> that I want to use to backup the Linux (Slackware) systems on my 
> private LAN. I can "smbmount" the drive okay on my Linux systems,
but
> when I try and use rsync to do a backup rsync fails with a message 
> about failing to change owner.
>
> Digging a little deeper into the problem I find that the 
> directories/files on the share all look something like the following
>
> drwxr-xr-x  1 35000 root       0 2008-02-12 15:21 ArchiveOnLinux
> drwxrwxrwx  1 35003 root       0 2008-04-22 01:01 Public
> -rwxrw-rw-  1 35000 root 1127239 2008-02-28 11:28 gw_rn_vp_grey.pdf
>
> which ISN'T the user (or group) I would have expected it to be mounted 
> as. (I've done a chmod u+s /usr/bin/smbmnt to allow users to mount the 
> share and I expected that the share would have the same owner as the 
> user that mounted it.)
>
> I've also found that I can't change ALL permissions ALL the time on
> the share's directories and files. I can remove group and world 
> privileges from a file (which are remembered after a umount and 
> remount) but I cannot restore them (even as root). Only the owner 
> privileges are consistently changeable.
>
> Basically, ALL I want to do is to be able to use the drive as a backup 
> that will maintain the same permissions, user, group, etc., as the 
> original files AND I want the files visible from both my Linux AND 
> Windows systems (because I need to use Nero on a Windows machine to do 
> the backups). Can someone help me figure out how to do this correctly?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Rick Johnson
>