Last revision September 20, 2010
chown is used to change the owning account or owning group for a file or directory. Only the root (system management) account is allowed to change the owning account of a file. Some Unix/Linux versions allow the owning account to change the owning group.
chmod is used to change the Unix/Linux permission settings on a file or directory. The owning account (and root) are allowed to use this command.
Both of these commands try to affect access permission rights for the file using Linux semantics. But files on sesfs file shares generally use the NTFS model to control access permissions. There is no simple mapping between the two permissions models.
When these commands are run by the owning account on a CEES computer to attempt to change ownership or permissions for a file on an sesfs file share, they will probably be ineffective. If the user asks the CEES system manager to run these commands from the root account, they can have serious unexpected side effects. In some cases, they will wipe out the existing NTFS ACL, which is carefully crafted to allow multiple users various levels of access, and replace it instead with a simple ACL that only allows access to root or to the single user in the chown command.
Don't use the chown or chmod commands on sesfs.stanford.edu file shares mounted on the CEES cluster computers.
Access rights to folders and files on shares on sesfs are controlled entirely by NTFS ACLs that are configured by the system managers to implement the access policies promulgated by the faculty member who requested the file share.
If you cannot access parts of the share, or wish to restrict others in the research group from accessing parts of the share, first confirm this policy change with the faculty owner of the share and then request the needed access changes via email to the system managers.