777 on NTFS partition by default?

[Makrand]

Hi all,

on my laptop, I have 1TB HDD and 120G SSD. SSD is boot and ext4. On other hand my 1TB (/dev/sdb1) drive is catering storage as NTFS partition.

/dev/sdb1 932G 16G 917G 2% /media/makrand/ntfs-store

1TB NTFS was created using Gparted few months back. I was running a vagrant to spin up few VMs. All vagrant boxes are stored on NTFS partition folder, so the vagrantfile. While I was spinning up VM using vagrant, I faced some error with auth_key. I looked up and realized that ALL things on NTFS are 777 the moment I create anything on that partition. chmod or chown (with and without sudo) just DO NOT work. Your run it and it neither give success or error message.

I never used NTFS with linux before. For some reasons I need to stick with NTFS here. Is it the case that all things on NTFS goes to 777 by default? Very strange indeed.

This is Mint XFCE 19 latest.

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makrand@mint-gl63:/media/makrand/ntfs-store$ ls -l
total 12
drwxrwxrwx 1 makrand makrand 4096 Oct 15 18:20 nix-data
drwxrwxrwx 1 makrand makrand 4096 Oct 15 17:58 tmpl
drwxrwxrwx 1 makrand makrand 4096 Oct  8 20:00 vbox_vms
drwxrwxrwx 1 makrand makrand    0 Jul 27 22:49 win-data
makrand@mint-gl63:/media/makrand/ntfs-store$ cd nix-data/
makrand@mint-gl63:/media/makrand/ntfs-store/nix-data$ ls -l
total 327876
-rwxrwxrwx 1 makrand makrand 54090226 Sep  1 15:50 google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb
-rwxrwxrwx 1 makrand makrand     1630 Jul 30 18:49 graphics

makrand@mint-gl63:/media/makrand/ntfs-store/nix-data$ chmod 700 google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb 
makrand@mint-gl63:/media/makrand/ntfs-store/nix-data$ sudo chmod 700 google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb 
[sudo] password for makrand: 
makrand@mint-gl63:/media/makrand/ntfs-store/nix-data$ ls -l
total 327876
-rwxrwxrwx 1 makrand makrand 54090226 Sep  1 15:50 google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb
-rwxrwxrwx 1 makrand makrand     1630 Jul 30 18:49 graphics
-rwxrwxrwx 1 makrand makrand   116420 Oct 15 18:20 libpng12-0_1.2.54-1ubuntu1.1_amd64.deb

[catweazel]

Very strange indeed.

It's not strange. NTFS simply doesn't support linux permissions.

[Makrand]

So I just need to live with 777 all time? thats bummer.

[altair4]

I don't understand the nature of the question.

chown and chmod do not work on NTFS because there are no Linux permission bits to change. What Linux does is create a "view" of the ntfs partition that makes it look - to both the user and the system - that it does have Linux permissions. This "view" is completely under your control.

So if the question is can I change the permissions of the mounted ntfs partition to say 700 the answer is yes:

[1] Create a mount point outside of /media/makrand:

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sudo mkdir /media/ntfs-store

[2] Add the following to the end of /etc/fstab - edit: changed mount point:

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UUID=bunch-of-numbers /media/ntfs-store ntfs defaults,uid=markrand,umask=077 0 0

You can find "bunch-of-numbers" by running this command:

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sudo blkid -c /dev/null

[3] Unmount the partition if it is currently mounted:

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sudo umount /media/markrand/ntfs-store

[4] Then remount with this command:

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sudo mount -a

If however the question is can I cange the permissions on a specific file the answer is no. This "view" is immutable. Every single file and folder in this new view will have owner = markrand and permissions of 700.

[Makrand]

@altair4

Appreciate the detailed reply.

So one needs to set xyz permission while mounting the NTFS. That permission will be propagated to all the DIR & FILES under that partition.

My question was - Why I can't change or set permission to specific entities. But your point about VIEW made my view clear about this

1) From what source did you read/grasp about view for NTFS?
2) I read somewhere - NTFS is a POSIX-compatible filesystem. So logically permissions should be available under Linux.

[altair4]

An NTFS partition has no Linux user or permissions bits so ntfs-3g uses FUSE to create a translation layer on top of the partition - creating a virtual filesystem - that makes it appear to you and the system itself that is does have them.

That is why an ntfs partition in Linux is slower ( comparatively speaking ) then the same partition in WIndows.

I don't remember when I stated to call it a "view". Maybe it came from using the term dealing with databases when I was young and incredibly good looking. Maybe it's because my view from Linux is different from how Windows views it.

[catweazel]

1) From what source did you read/grasp about view for NTFS?

It comes from years of experience.