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I'm using an old Windows PC as a NAS, it has 3 drives in it. I wiped the system drive and installed Lubuntu but I left the other 2 drives NTFS. Directories on them were mounted as shares using cifs on the other machines in our LAN and all was well.

In an attempt to improve performance, I saved all the data, wiped one of the data drives and formatted it ext4, then copied the data back (I used an ext4 formatted external drive to do this).

Ever since then it's been a big pain to use because I keep running into permission problems. I did not change the fstab entry for the drive at all except for the new UUID and file system type. But I am constantly encountering 'visible only to owner', 'unable to copy file' etc permission problems. Meanwhile the NTFS formatted drive hums away with no problems at all.

One visible difference is that when I create folders on the share, their icons have a lock on top of them. This does not happen on the NTFS share.

Is there a way to globally fix these annoying permission problems and get back to the smooth operations I had when the drive was formatted NTFS?

Edit w/ additional info: My fstab entry for the drive on the machine it's physically in is UUID=89e88c2b-d720-465a-95ad-f74705885127 /media/Win-F ext4 defaults 0 0

On the client machine the fstab entry is

//192.168.1.2/ST8\040F\040Drive /media/ST8-F-Drive cifs credentials=/home/bill/.sharelogin,iocharset=utf8,sec=ntlm,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777,nobootwait 0 0

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This happens because ext4 is a native filesystem for Linux which supports ACL's while NTFS is not a native filesystem for Linux and as such does not support the ACL's but it does support access rights that can be defined in for example the fstab file. So to solve the problem you need to make sure that you're a member of a group that has sufficient access rights to the ext4 file system.

This command will help you to overcome the access problems of the existing files: chmod -R 777 /media/your mount. Change /media/your mount according to your needs.

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  • Thanks! That sounds promising. How do I go about checking my group membership and ensuring that it is correct? Jul 9, 2015 at 23:11
  • You basically need to be a member of the same group as the current owner or be the current owner. But I've edited the answer with a solution to overcome your current ownership issue for the existing files.
    – wie5Ooma
    Jul 9, 2015 at 23:24
  • Doing a stat -c "%a %n" on the existing mount directory tells me it's already at 777. Jul 9, 2015 at 23:48
  • I added fstab info to the question. To fix the group problem, Is there something I should change here? Or is it in the fstab on the client machine, where I mount it using cifs? Thanks for your interest in helping me out! Jul 9, 2015 at 23:58
  • That stat command is about the mountpoint not about the files in the mountpoint. Otherwise you should have sufficient rights to all the files. Since you use Samba/cifs you can set the permissions right that way too. Your mount command looks messed up because you mix / and \ in the same command.
    – wie5Ooma
    Jul 10, 2015 at 0:04

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