The problem:
Auto-mounting an NTFS external hard drive on Slackware 12.0 & Fluxbox 1.00 using Ivman and ntfs-3g.

The question:
Essentially, what is the best way to do this? Specifically, I have ivman working fine except that I require root privileges to use ntfs-3g (ntfs-3g-mount: failed to open /dev/fuse: Permission denied) which means if I load ivman through the startup script, it will not mount the hard drive. (Unless there is some way of accessing root privileges in the startup script? I tried "exec sudo ivman &" but that sure didn't work.)

I've noticed one such work around which would be to create a new group, call it fuse, and chgrp /dev/fuse and add myself to this group. Is this viable? Or is there a better solution?

One last thing:
Does anyone have some example IvmConfig*.xml files for examples? I have most of it going great, but I could always use some more resources.

That should not be necessary, as the permission denied error shouldn't be happening.
If you're on Slackware -current, you should have /etc/udev/rules.d/99-fuse.rules causing the /dev/fuse node to have 0666 permissions.

If you're on 12.0 or older, then you should complain to whomever packaged fuse for you, as it's broken.

Thanks rworkman. I realized I could simplify my life a little bit if I edited the sudoers file to allow mounting the hdd without a password. It seems to have taken care of any problems that I was having.

Though I'm not sure how good of an idea it is to allow mounting without a password. Live and learn I guess.

Try this.

Wow! Now that is some delayed response time .

Thanks though quanta. I'm not sure it'll help much at this point, but who knows.

I came across this thread while googling for a solution for the similar problem. I was hitting on the same error while trying to mount my local windows partition while running Debian.

Though I did not find a lead here I discovered later that my ntfs-3g binary no longer had it's suid bit set. Resetting it's suid bit restored the behavior of being able to local partitions without being root.

I thought that might help you in case you are still practicing using 'sudo' while mounting. Also I think the solution might be the same even though you use Slackware. Hope this helps

My actual problem is now to discover how and why the 'ntfs-3g' binary's suid bit keeps resetting itself every time I boot.

That the suid bit has to set so that unprivileged users can mount was learnt from "How to mount local ntfs partitions without being root"

-Abhijith Madhav