[olug] Mounting Flash Drives as a user

[Christopher Cashell]

At Sun, 23 Oct 05, Unidentified Flying Banana Don E. Kauffman, said:
> I'd like to know if there is a way to mount flash devices as a user --
> not as root. Failing that I'd like to know if there is a way that one
> can mount and unmount without having to be root. I'm using Suse 9.3. 

Taken from man mount(1):

----
(iii)  Normally,  only  the superuser can mount file systems.  However,
when fstab contains the user option on a line, anybody  can mount  the
corresponding system.

Thus, given a line:
   /dev/cdrom  /cd  iso9660 ro,user,noauto,unhide
any user can mount the iso9660 file system found on his CDROM using the
command
   mount /dev/cdrom
or
   mount /cd
For more details, see fstab(5).  Only the user that mounted a filesys-
tem  can unmount it again.  If any user should be able to unmount, then
use users instead of user in the fstab line.  The owner option is simi-
lar  to the user option, with the restriction that the user must be the
owner of the special file. This may be useful e.g.  for  /dev/fd if  a
login script  makes  the console user owner of this device.  The group
option is similar, with the restriction that the user must be member of
the group of the special file.
----

So, basically, you just need to setup a line in /etc/fstab that allows
for the mounting of the flash drive with the user(s) option.

Something like this:

/dev/sdd1    /mnt/flash    auto   defaults,user,noauto      0     2

Should work.  Feel free to post snips of your /etc/fstab if you can't
get it working.

> Don K.

-- 
| Christopher
+------------------------------------------------+
| Here I stand.  I can do no other.              |
+------------------------------------------------+