Re: How to make gnus store received mail in the directory /mnt/windows?

[Derrell.Lipman@UnwiredUniverse.com]

> Rodolfo:
>
>> in my /etc/fstab I changed the line:

>
>> /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850 0 0
>
>> into:
>
>> /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850 0 0,uid=501,gid=501
>
>> . Is that what you meant?
>
>
> Adam:
>
>> Read the manual-page for fstab. (Hint: you put the options in the
>> wrong place). Besides that: yes.
>
>
> What's it, a guessing game?
> I read all through the fstab manual, and also the mount options for fat,
> and neither there nor there it is said what the right place should be
> for the uid and gid options.

The fields on each line are separated by spaces.  The fourth field is the
options field, with options separated by commas.  The fifth and sixth fields
(both zeros in this case) are not part of the options.

This is likely the line you're looking for:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,uid=501,gid=501 0 0

That will mount /dev/hda1 on the mountpoint /mnt/windows and all files and
folders will be "simulated" owned by user 501, group 501 (since there are no
users/groups in reality, on a FAT file system).

This may or may not solve your problem.  Without setting uid and gid, it
appeared that /mnt/windows was writable.  I'm not sure, however, what the vfat
file system returns when the POSIX chmod() call is used to change permissions,
since there is no such concept of permissions on a FAT file system.  It may
return an error, in which case any application that requires being able to
change permissions on a file will fail to operate properly on a Unix/Linux-
mounted FAT file system.  Either gnus will have to change to not consider a
chmod() failure to be fatal, or you will have to use a different file system
for your message repository.  (I highly suspect that gnus is doing chmod() as
a security precaution, to ensure that your messages are not readable by anyone
other than yourself.  If so, then it's unlikely that that feature would be
removed.)

It could also be that only the simulated owner is allowed to issue the chmod()
call on a mounted FAT file system, in which case setting uid and gid may help.

Derrell