Permissions have me stumped

[Andrew]

On Wed, 2006-03-01 at 14:49 -0600, Kirk Strauser wrote:
> I have a directory, /usr/share/media, where I store all my pictures, songs,
> videos, and other random stuff.  The directory is chgrp media and chmod
> 2770 so that every member of the media group can write to it, and all files
> writing to it will be readable by everyone else in the media group.
> 
> What I don't really understand is why I can't update any timestamps on its
> subdirectories, even though it looks like I should be able to:
> 
>     $ ls -lad /usr/share/media/music
>     drwxrws---  4 root  media  512 Mar  1 14:40 /usr/share/media/music
>     $ touch -t 200603011234.45 /usr/share/media/music
>     touch: /usr/share/media/music: Operation not permitted
> 
> The only reason this is an issue at all is that I have a script that rsyncs
> my this directory tree with a similar one on my machine at work, and it
> throws a large number of warnings ever time the rsync command runs:
> 
>     $ rsync -auvx janus:/usr/share/media/music/ /usr/share/media/music/
>     receiving file list ... done
>     rsync: failed to set times on "/usr/share/media/music/.": Operation not permitted (1)
>     rsync: failed to set times on "/usr/share/media/music/albums": Operation not permitted (1)
>     rsync: failed to set times on "/usr/share/media/music/singles": Operation not permitted (1)
>     rsync: failed to set times on "/usr/share/media/music/.": Operation not permitted (1)
>     rsync: failed to set times on "/usr/share/media/music/albums": Operation not permitted (1)
>     rsync: failed to set times on "/usr/share/media/music/singles": Operation not permitted (1)
>     ...
> 
> I know this is pretty minor in the scheme of things, but it still bothers me
> because it looks like it should work, but it doesn't.

Any chance that this would happen to be a FAT32 file system? I'm not
using rsync, but I have a similar setup, (shared media files on a FAT32
partition), and have had numerous annoying errors because of this. Most
notably, not being able to change user/group ownership of anything on
that partition. I'm not quite sure how or if that relates to your
troubles, though...

-Andrew