First of all I am a noob, this is really my first linux box and I have a couple of books coming to help with commands and the such, but I need some understanding about the flags used with mounting dives and partitions.

Ok, here is the situation: I have this box that has an 80 gig drive on it split into 4 partitions: a 4 gig, 10 gig, 2 gig, and the rest (about 60 or so, formatted as fat). I am using the 60+/- partition for 'personal files' and downloads. I FINALLY got SUSE to mount the drive correctly to give me full access to the drive (using the uid=(my user id numb)).

My question is this: is there anyway to mount this drive to make it accessible to anyone who has an account on this computer? Is this done with the gid? If so doesn't this open some possible security risks to network attacks?

Thanks for any info you guys can provide =)

Art

Normally, only the superuser can mount file systems. However,
when fstab contains the user option on a line, anybody can mount the
corresponding system. (This is from the man page: 'mount' )

Which user option are you talking about? Also I read somewhere that only certain options are supported by fat systems (I don't think that user was one of them). Thanks for your help =)

-Art

There are two: literally "user" and "users". FAT has restrictions related to file attributes. I don't see those restrictions affecting the ability to mount the filesystem.
Just add 'user' or 'users' to your fstab file as described in the manual page for 'mount' and try it out.