Networking at home

umask is a user related setting in Linux, which specifies, that when creating a new file or directory which permissions will be set. For the shells users can set the umask with the umask command (what a surprice :-) or they can set the defult value using the same command in the shell init scripts. But there are other programs (like Samba), which are using the umask and they are not taking into account the changes what users are making after they have logged in into the system. To change the umask for them as the pam_umask manual says, you need to set the values in the GECOS fields. But what is GECOS? You can find it in Wikipedia , that it is in the /etc/passwd file, but it may be more difficult to find an example for it. To put it short, the GECOS fields are the 5th element in the passwd file and the fields are separated by comas. In the following example we set the umask for the user test: test:x:1003:100:Test user ,umask=0002 :/home/test:/bin/bash

I have created a Share on a Samba server, to be used commonly by several users, with the goal, that all users belonging to a Unix group (in this case "users") can read and write these files, but nobody else should have access to these files. Speaking in unix permissions I wanted to add the 0770 mask to these files. After reading the Samba documentation I concluded that I need to set the "force create mode"/"force directory mode" parameters for this share and this should do the trick. After setting it up it was working well for my account (the first, account created during installation), but it was not working for a second account, which I have created manually, and where I have added it manually to the users group as its primary group. For this account it always omitted the group write attribute for the directories, where the resulting permission was always 0750. After some investigation it turned out that Samba was honoring the "umask" re...