Cannot change ownership of a network folder shared from Windows

Question

I have problem to change the permissions on a shared folder from Windows in elementary OS. I am using the chown command and it throws me the following error:

pablo@pablo:/home$ LANGUAGE=en sudo chown -R pablo /home/pablo/redwin
[sudo] password for pablo:
chown: changing ownership of ‘/home/pablo/redwin/pagefile.sys’: Device or resource busy
chown: changing ownership of ‘/home/pablo/redwin/RECYCLER/S-1-5-21-1606980848-152049171-839522115-1003’: Permission denied
chown: changing ownership of ‘/home/pablo/redwin/RECYCLER/S-1-5-21-2000478354-1214440339-1801674531-1003’: Permission denied
chown: changing ownership of ‘/home/pablo/redwin/System Volume Information’: Permission denied
chown: changing ownership of ‘/home/pablo/redwin’: Permission denied

It is a shared network folder.

Someone knows what could happen?

Answer 1

As cifs is kind of foreign concept to Linux, you cannot always use common Linux tools to change things like owner or permissions (especially regarding network shares). To get write access to your share, you will need to add options to your /etc/fstab entry, more specific the options uid and gid. Currently, the user root is mounting your network share during boot up, so the system does not know your want write access (respectively ownership) to it as well. To get the values for uid and gid, run id -u $USER (for your uid) and id -g $USER (for your gid).

Now, modify your /etc/fstab accordingly:

//path/to/share /mount/point cifs auto,user=<user>,password=<password>,exec,user,nounix,rw,iocharset=utf8,uid=<UID>,gid=<GID> 0 0