Setting up a shared media drive
- by Sam Brightman
I want to have a shared media drive be transparently usable to all users, whilst also sticking to FHS and Ubuntu standards. The former takes priority if necessary. I currently mount it at /media/Stuff but /media is supposed to be for external media, I believe. The main issue is setting permissions so that access to read and write to the drive can be granted to multiple users working within the same directories.
InstallingANewHardDrive seems both slightly confused and not what I want. It claims that this sets ownership for the top-level directory (despite the recursion flag):
sudo chown -R USERNAME:USERNAME /media/mynewdrive
And that this will let multiple users create files and sub-directories but only delete their own:
sudo chgrp plugdev /media/mynewdrive
sudo chmod g+w /media/mynewdrive
sudo chmod +t /media/mynewdrive
However, the group writeable bit does not seem to get inherited, which is troublesome for keeping things organised (prevents creation inside sub-folders originally made by another user). The sticky bit is probably also unwanted for the same reason, although currently it seems that one userA (perhaps the owner of the mount-point?) can delete the userB's files, but not vice-versa. This is fine, as long as userB can create files inside the directory of userA. So:
What is the correct mount point?
Is plugdev the correct group?
Most importantly, how to set up permissions to maintain an organised media drive?
I do not want to be running cron jobs to set permissions regularly!