File sharing on pen drives & FAT partitions fails.

[Adam Luter]

Inserting a pen drive into Ubuntu automatically mounts it for the desktop user to see it. However, using the file explorer to then share that pen drive fails. There seems to be no trivial solution on the internet.

-- edit by Karol Stasiak

It's the same if you try to share files located on any other FAT partition.

[David Siegel (djsiegel-deactivatedaccount)]

What do you mean, sharing the pen drive? Please give detailed steps to reproduce the buggy behavior. Which version of Ubuntu?

[Adam Luter (adam-luter)]

Hello, I am using Ubuntu 9.04. I insert the pen drive and bring up the device in Nautilus. I right click the empty space to select properties -> share -> share this folder -> create share.

I receive this error message:

'net usershare' returned error 255: net usershare add: cannot share path /media/disk as we are restricted to only sharing directories we own.
 Ask the administrator to add the line "usershare owner only = false"
 to the [global] section of the smb.conf to allow this.

However, even after doing this, I still cannot check the 'allow others to write to this folder'. I'm also concerned that I have to change configuration settings in a system daemon to share at all, since this is just a user-mounted pen drive.

[Adam Luter (adam-luter)]

Also, the shares seem to behave oddly, for instance if you go back to the properties box the share settings have reverted. Creating it again works, but creating it again with a new name causes a second copy of the share to be made.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please answer these questions:

 * Is this reproducible?
 * If so, what specific steps should we take to recreate this bug?

 This will help us to find and resolve the problem.

[Karol Stasiak (stasiu88)]

It's the same with sharing files located on any FAT partitions. I have 2 FAT32 partitions and I had to manually edit some configuration files to be able to easily share files.

[Adam Luter (adam-luter)]

Yes, it's reproducible on all of my pen drives that I have on all of my ports. I only have the one installation of Ubuntu, but this has been a problem since before the last major upgrade (I can't say if it was a problem before because I did not try to share them before that point). In fact, it was much worse before because the error message was much less helpful and did not suggest the samba permission override. But the basic problem, it seems is that you don't own the files that have been mounted for you so the rest of the sharing system gets upset.

I have outlined the steps above that reproduce the problem for me, I don't know of any more general case.

[ShawnJGoff (shawnjgoff)]

I agree that the fix should be to make the current user (if there is only one logged in user) the owner of the drive.

[Omer Akram (om26er)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue you are reporting is an upstream one and it would be nice if somebody having it could send the bug to the developers of the software by following the instructions at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME. If you have done so, please tell us the number of the upstream bug (or the link), so we can add a bugwatch that will inform us about its status. Thanks in advance.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Could you try if that's still an issue in lucid?

[Sense Egbert Hofstede (sense)]

Thank you for helping with making Ubuntu better by reporting this issue. However, this is a duplicate of bug #482641 and I'm marking it as such.
I'm also rejecting this as a papercut because it's not something many users would do and I'm not sure how easy it would be to quickly fix this bug.