ntfs-3g does not write correct permissions to fstab for user read-write access

[John Dong]

I walked a user through using ntfs-config to give an existing Windows partition read-write access. It failed to set correct permissions. ntfs-3g wrote the following fstab line:

UUID=9A68FFC168FF99E9 /media/sda1 ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 1

A quick ls -al, and testing with Nautilus confirms that users do not have write permission to the mountpoint, but root does.

A fix is to change this fstab line to:

UUID=9A68FFC168FF99E9 /media/sda1 ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_US.UTF-8,umask=007,gid=46 0 1

This gives group 46 (the plugdev group) read-write access, while giving non-plugdev users no access. Or, perhaps umask=002 is more appropriate. In either case, IMO plugdev is an appropriate group to give write access to, and it has worked well for the time I've been using ntfs-3g.

[John Dong (jdong)]

I registered a bzr branch with a simple 1-liner that should fix this bug in the way I described....

[Florent Mertens (givre)]

Hum, don't see what the problem.
from the manual (current feisty version) :

" By default, files and directories are owned by the effective user and
group of the mounting process and everybody has full read, write, exe‐
cution and directory browsing permissions."

This means that without uid, gid..., user/group will be set to root,
but permission will be set to 777, so everybody can read/write.
Can you give me ls -l of /media/sda1.

[Florent Mertens (givre)]

John, could you confirm this bug, or i'll reject it.
You're the first person in the thousands of people that
use this tool that fall into that thing.

[John Dong (jdong)]

I could not confirm it happening on the latest ntfs-3g releases.... hmm.... oh well :)