Adding Windows user to Linux group; possible?

Question

I have a NAS that runs on Linux and I connect to it from my Windows desktop. I noticed that all directory in that drive belongs to user 'root' and group 'root'. That effectively denies me the right to write on those directory; only read rights.

Is there a way I can add my desktop username e.g. sara-laptop/sara into the Linux root group which will then give me rights to write on those directory?

I was thinking about changing the ownership to nobody/nobody which will give everyone rights to write on it. But could be a bad idea as I'm worried that other users will accidentally delete some of my items.

Thanks.

Answer 1

It seems that some important information on how you are accessing the NAS is missing - it doesn't seem likely that you would have been sold a NAS that's read-only.

Anyway, if you are attaching the NAS share from Windows, then the NAS is likely to be running samba (to provide SMB/CIFS interface for Windows) - in that case you'd need to tweak its configuration, probably in /etc/samba, since samba handles users separately from those on the underlying unix system (at least to some extent).

As for the original question - it's not only a matter of user/group, you also need to know the access rights, which usually are rwx for owner, and r-x for group and others. Hence adding yourself to the group might not necessarily help anyway. However, for both of the above, there should be some simple web interface running on the NAS, where you could set it to your liking.