[andrew davidoff]

hello all,

i'm having a problem. perhaps this is expected behavior, but i don't know why, or why it would be.

a friend has an external firewire drive formatted hfs+. when mounted i have confirmed from the get info window that 'ignore ownership on this volume' is unchecked.

all files on the drive are owned by user 'tim', group 'unknown'. this is confirmed via doing a directory listing from a term when logged in as an administrator, the same who mounted the drive. i'm actually a bit confused as to why the group is unknown, but so much file swapping has been done on this drive that it's hard to say what caused this. that's beside the point though.

a test account was created (for ftp only) with its home dir being the mount point for the external drive.

the problem is that although the perms on the file system look okay on the local machine, when this test user logs in via ftp all files appear to be owned by them, and they can in fact manipulate them all as if they're actually the owner. i enabled sshd and set the user's shell to a valid one and things look the same when logged in via ssh.

as stated, the 'ignore ownership' box is UNchecked for this drive. so, what's going on here?

btw, i think it's a huge security hole that by default os x ignores perms on drives that weren't attached at install time, but that's another discussion for another time.

thanks to anyone who can sort this,
andrew davidoff

[proton]

Expected behaviour. There used to be a release note on this included with the developer tools, but it seems to have disappeared with XCode 1.5. (What's all that about Apple?)

Try reading this:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...20418091450891

Summary:
sudo vsdbutil -a /Volumes/YourHardDisk

- proton

[andrew davidoff]

many thanks.

i am familiar with *nix operating systems and understand the concepts of uid and gid. i guess this drive was originally partitioned and loaded up on a different computer, or during the massive amount of computer swapping he does things got weird.

this should help him solve his "problem.

thank you.

andrew davidoff

[andrew davidoff]

as a follow up...

after 'adopting' the drive with vsdbutil new files and directories were showing with the proper permissions when viewing them as another user via ftp, but anything that existed before adopting the drive was still showing as owned by whoever was viewing them, group unknown. we did a chmod -R to set everything how we wanted it, and now everything is behving as we wanted it to. that is, the perms and ownership the user who mounts the drive sees are what anyone else who view those files sees.

thanks again for the info. another +1 for macnn.

andrew davidoff