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

[Rodolfo Medina <romeomedina@libero.it>]

Derrell wrote:

> 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.


Yes, the problem seems to be solved editing the file /etc/fstab and replacing
the line:
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850 0 0
with:
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat
umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,uid=501,gid=501 0 0


Derrell:

> 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.


The attempt of doing chmod by a different user than `rodolfo' generates
an error message:

[carolina@localhost carolina]$ chmod o+r /mnt/windows
chmod: changing permissions of `/mnt/windows': Operation not permitted


Derrell:

> 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.


That seems to be true: in fact I did: 
$ ls -l /mnt/windows/mail-prova/mail/misc 
, and it is shown that the files gnus just created, 
when retrieving mail and storing it in that dir, 
are only readable (and writable, of course) by the user rodolfo:

-rw-------  1 rodolfo rodolfo   827 Aug 15 22:20 61
-rw-------  1 rodolfo rodolfo 15007 Aug 15 22:20 62
-rw-------  1 rodolfo rodolfo  1145 Aug 15 22:20 63



Derrell:

> 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.
> [...]
> 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.


That also seems to be true:
in fact, as user `rodolfo' I was able to change permissions over /mnt/windows
and its subdirs.

But then, no other user different than the one set
in /etc/fstab will be able to do the same thing, i.e. store mail with gnus
in the vfat file system /mnt/windows:
unless the command chmod can change permissions also to
all the files of a certain directory, even those that don't exist yet.
This way, the user uid 501 could make writable *all* the files of 
/mnt/windows/mail-prova/mail/misc, also the future ones, and then
other users could store there their mails with gnus.
Is that possible? 

Thanks to all who've been providing help,
Rodolfo