[clug-talk] What FS type for 80GB USB drive

[Roy Souther]

I need my system to be able to let uses read and write to USB drives and memory devices when they plug them into their local station. When a user inserts a USB device I have the system locate the user ID by the owner of the DISPLAY session. The device is then mounted in their home directory. For USB memory sticks I use the UID and GID so that all entries on the device are owned by them and they have full rights. This works great for small USB memory sticks that come pre-formated as vfat because vfat supports the UID and GID options.

New problem. Someone wants to plug in an 80GB external USB drive. The drive came as NTFS. Linux cannot write to NTFS in any way that a Windows system could read the data back. Vfat does not support partitions larger then 32GB and ext2 & 3 do not support UID or GID so the system is owned by root.

I would like some way to make the mounted 80GB drive ext2 or ext3 and owned by the user that inserted the device just the same way I do with small USB memory sticks. I cannot figure out any way to do that. Everything I have tried has failed and only root can write to the drive.

Linux has an NTFS DLL wrapper that will use the Windows DLL's to write to the drive so that Windows can read them but I don't think I am allowed to distribute those DLL's. I really need an unencumbered solution.

So I am looking at all the different FS types that Linux supports, there are a lot. Can you give me your input on what FS to use? Do any FS types support large size and UID/GID that both Linux and Windows can read?

Royce Souther www.SiliconTao.com Let Open Source help your business move beyond. For security this message is digitally authenticated by GnuPG.

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