Files copy from Samba share as read-only

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Files copy from Samba share as read-only

I have a Samba share from my Linux machine on my LAN. It's been setup for a while and I've had no problems with it for as long as I can remember. Now, when I copy files they appear as read only and prompt for a password when I delete them. How do I make sure the files copy as read/write?

There are two things I've changed recently, but changing both of them back did not seem to fix my problem...

1) Stopped OS X from creating .DS_Store files on the share by running:
$ defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

2) Set the Samba share to read-only, but then did revert it back.

Seems like such a silly problem, but I don't know why it started all of a sudden.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.2)

Posted on Mar 19, 2008 4:52 PM

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Answer 1

Kimos Author

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Mar 24, 2008 4:42 PM in response to Kimos

Well, despite a lack of suggestions, I figured out what the problem is and resolved it.

The old file system on the Samba server was mapped to a NTFS drive, and as a result had 777 permissions for every file. When I moved my drive to ext3 and mapped the share in smb.conf, the permissions were inherited. Even though the folders were read-write, the Linux file permissions were passed across. The tricky bit is this line in the conf file:

guest account = nobody

Since SMB reads the files as nobody, it inherits and passes across the permissions of 644 for each file as nobody, setting the file as read only.

There as no problem with OS X. Setting the guest account to be my username in smb.conf cleared the problem up.

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