[gentoo-user] Mediatomb media server - users & permissions for /media/videoX

[Stroller]

Hi there,

I'm in the process of ripping my DVD collection to mp4 and have just  
installed net-misc/mediatomb. I am EXTREMELY impressed with this  
service, which has very quickly demonstrated a marvellous ability to  
stream video to my PS3.

On my server I have two largish hard-drives which are used for  
miscellaneous storage - backups, drivers & service packs for my work,  
customer backups and all these video files which will soon be rapidly  
increasing in quantity.

Because of the miscellaneous nature of this data, I have mounted these  
two disks at /mnt/space and /mnt/morespace Following a discussion a  
while back I will probably move them to /media/video[123] or /media/ 
spaceX when I get around to reorganising.

Permissions on these volumes are such that any user on the system (me,  
hypothetically trusted friends or family in the future) should have  
full access to all the miscellaneous junk on them. I need to play back  
videos and delete the old versions when I decide a film needs to be  
ripped in higher quality.

I'm a little unclear as to how these permissions have been applied -  
shouldn't it be based either on the permissions of the mount-point  
directory, or added as an "-o users,umask=000" in /etc/fstab ?

   $ grep space /etc/fstab
   LABEL=space			/mnt/space	xfs			noatime 	0 3
   LABEL=MoreSpace		/mnt/morespace	xfs		noatime 	0 3
   $ sudo umount /mnt/morespace/
   $ ls -lh /mnt/
   total 0
   drwxrwx--- 2 root cdrom  72 May 28  2007 dvdrom
   drwxrwx--- 2 root users  48 Sep 21 23:24 foo
   drwxrwxrwx 2 root root   48 May 19  2007 morespace
   drwxrwx--- 8 root users 116 Sep 11 11:53 space
   $ sudo mount -a
   $ ls -lh /mnt/
   total 4.0K
   drwxrwx--- 2 root cdrom   72 May 28  2007 dvdrom
   drwxrwx--- 2 root users   48 Sep 21 23:24 foo
   drwxrwx--- 5 root users 4.0K Sep 15 20:46 morespace
   drwxrwx--- 8 root users  116 Sep 11 11:53 space
   $


Anyway, the problem that I encountered was that Mediatomb was unable  
to read these drives because Gentoo init.d script (very sensibly, IMO)  
runs the server as its own user, which clearly did not have permission  
to read these disks. I like this idea, because I tend to trust the  
users on my system (this may be foolish!) yet fear a hijacked daemon  
maliciously deleting my collection of Carry On films.

You can see here how I've worked around the problem for the moment:

$ grep -ie user -ie group /etc/conf.d/mediatomb
# Run MediaTomb as this user.
MEDIATOMB_USER="mediatomb"
# Run MediaTomb as this group.
#MEDIATOMB_GROUP="mediatomb"
MEDIATOMB_GROUP="users"
$

However I'm posting to solicit suggestions on the best permissions  
practices for this purpose. mediatomb shouldn't need write access to  
these files or folders at all - there's no option on the UPnP client,  
for instance, to delete files from the server. Should I make the  
drives owned by "users" and in the "mediatomb" group, with read-only  
access for the latter? Any other suggestions?

Stroller.