Extenal harddrive userid and moving from computer to computer
I just formatted my pendrive to be EXT4 since I primarily use Linux and thought: why not let met give it a shot.
But I quickly realized one major problem:
The filesystem uses user ids to describe files and my userid doesn't always stay the same across computers. On my personal computers, it may be possible to change all my user ids to match up, but I think this is an unreasonable requirement especially when logging on to work computers.
Has anybody dealt with this before (somebody must have this is a very basic use case)? What did you use as a workaround? Did you simply switch back to NTFS?
I'm using Fedora 19 on my computers.
Perhaps change the permissions for all users to read and write on the hard drive?
chmod -R a+rw /run/media/username/hard_drive_name
I trust that's one way to do it ...
That is true, but that kinda defeats the purpose of having user permissions. But those are probably made useless by the fact that anybody can connect to the drive and view it as root on their personal machine.
Unfirtunately yes. But, I do not know of any other way - except perhaps using a encrypted drive (like I do).
Right, so, LUKS encryption + EXT4 partition would be rather annoying to use since you would keep having to recusively change the UID on all the files, or make them readable/writable by everyone, which would probably be annoying when copying the files back an forth from your computer.
If you want multiple users to have access to shared resources, add the users to a group and give the group permission to access the files. Since you're creating the group just for this, it should not me hard to make everything match.