[olug] root: permission denied, on reiserfs dir?

Brian Wiese bwiese at cotse.com
Sun May 25 14:14:49 UTC 2003


Ok, I "had" and odd situation just a moment ago...

I have a 60gig reiserfs formatted hard drive in a nearby gnu/linux box
being shared (/mnt/lib-data) with samba.  I am backing up my data from
several computers, but just now came into a situation where not even root
can modify (write/delete) data on this one directory "windoze" though
samba...

So here are the different directories I have for backups from each
computer:

franklin:/mnt/lib-data/backups# ls -al
total 44
drwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         4096 May 24 22:23 .
drwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         4096 May 24 22:17 ..
drwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         4096 May 24 22:21 braveheart-deb
drwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         4096 Nov 27 21:03 franklin-deb
drwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         4096 May 24 22:21 freedom-laptop
drwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         4096 Jan 30 10:28 liberty-suse
drwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         4096 May 24 22:24 newfolder
drwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         4096 May 24 22:22 patriot-obsd
drwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         4096 May 24 22:22 solo_laptop_saves
drwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         4096 May 24 16:40 windoze

Now I just copied data over to the "windoze" directory from a WinXP
system, but all of the files appeared to have proper permissions set.  I
could "touch dirname/new", "rm dirname/new" as much as I wanted for any of
the above directories -- except the "windoze" one!

I tried going down as deep into the directory as possible to remove a
file, and could not.

franklin:/mnt/lib-data/backups/windoze/scanned-docs# ls -al
total 37458
drwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         4096 May 24 16:39 .
drwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         4096 May 24 16:40 ..
drwxr-xr-x    1 root     root         4096 May 24 16:39 Officemax-Rebates
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root       116232 May 24 16:39
UNO-finaid-audit-1.jpg-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root      5052653 May 24
16:39 w2s-2002.JPG

franklin:/mnt/lib-data/backups/windoze/scanned-docs# rm w2s-2002.JPG
rm: cannot remove `w2s-2002.JPG': Permission denied

- solution - 

When I logged in locally on the machine (liberty) sharing this drive
though, I was able to su to root and modify (write/delete) any file there
I wanted... but if I recall user bwiese (who had permissions to do so)
could not do that.  Is there any possible explanation for this of just bad
magic??!!  I feel pretty humble being "root" and not being able to delete
a file when I wanted to... would this have anything to do with copying the
files over from a Winxp machine? 

lsattr does not work on this mount/partition (remote through samba or
locally), lsattr returns:

"lsattr: Inappropriate ioctl for device While reading flags on
<filenamehere>"  

Actually, I just noticed that lsattr reports the same thing on every file
on this liberty (suse 7.3 gnu/linux) system.  Is this bad?  Apparently
this is a reiserfs limitation.

thanks, peace

  Brian Wiese | bwiese at cotse.com | aim: unolinuxguru
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