howto: user access to automounted fstab devices

Andruha · 03-20-2007, 08:20 PM

the short question is:
what solution would it be to make automatically mounted fstab entries accessible by users?

the long one contains a whole story :)

I use Slackware 10 as an alternative OS and in my case root can easily access
all of the following automounted devices, including FAT32/NTFS partitions, but neither can user.
It would have been perfect for me to hide all the mounting tasks from users, so that logged in user (or some specific user for better security?) would be able to access permanent logical drives (just like it is in windows)

I have the following in my fstab:

Code:

/dev/hdb9        swap             swap        defaults         0   0
/dev/hdb1        /                ext2        defaults         1   1
/dev/hdb5        /mnt/drv-d       vfat        defaults         1   0
/dev/hdb6        /mnt/drv-e       vfat        defaults         1   0
/dev/hdb7        /mnt/drv-f       vfat        defaults         1   0
/dev/hdb8        /mnt/drv-t       ntfs        ro               1   0
/dev/cdrom       /mnt/cdrom       iso9660     noauto,owner,ro  0   0
/dev/fd0         /mnt/floppy      auto        noauto,owner     0   0
devpts           /dev/pts         devpts      gid=5,mode=620   0   0
proc             /proc            proc        defaults         0   0

otherwise it's difficult (as for me) to follow 'life without root' approach because my "life" (work files, video, music, etc) is mostly on other logical partitions and drives, i.e. physically not in linux ext2 partition mounted as / (or at /home or something alike).

As a typical windows user (tm) ;) I used to organize my drives/partitions as follows:

OS primary partition: this is limited only to OS-specific data and hardly OS-coupled programs that would not survive OS-reinstall. In case of crash I can easily reuse this partition with a new installation.
logical maintenance partition: system tools to check, fix or reinstall windows, drive utilities and so on.
a set of logical drives with any other files: programs that do not depend hardly on particular windows OS type and installation-made registry entries, documents, video, music, etc.

It makes it easy for both working with multiple Win-OS (I currently use XP and 2003 w/o virtualization) and reinstalling them if necessary (though, there is nothing easy in reinstalling linux, i.e. currently I don't have much expertise in separating 'uninteresting' system files from 'important' user's ones)

So, I welcome any help in following this approach together with using slack10.
Thanks for your help.

nflenz · 03-20-2007, 09:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Andruha

the short question is:
what solution would it be to make automatically mounted fstab entries accessible by users?

Try changing the permissions for the mount points

Code:

# chmod 777 /mnt/drv-[d-f]

rkelsen · 03-20-2007, 10:51 PM

Try changing your mount options. Something like the following line will auto-mount the partition and allow full read/write access by all users.

Code:

/dev/hdb5        /mnt/drv-d       vfat        rw,defaults,umask=0         1   0

You can change it to allow only certain groups (with the 'gid' option) or certain users (with the 'uid' option).

Andruha · 03-21-2007, 04:52 AM

I beg your pardon, it seems like all my question had been already answered elsewhere.
I should have performed a better search before posting.
Anyway, thank you for replies.