Re: [gentoo-user] User can mount/umount but not write to top the new drive

["Canek Peláez Valdés" <caneko@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 2:59 PM, Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>   This has long been a sort of hack area of me in terms of sys admin
> at home - giving a user account access to the top of a new external
> drive. I'd like to learn to do this right. Maybe someone can set me
> straight about what root needs to do to make this work.
>
>   OK, so as root I partition & format the USB drive to get it ready,
> and then I modify fstab with the following addition:
>
> c2stable ~ # cat /etc/fstab | grep VideoLib
> LABEL=VideoLib          /mnt/VideoLib           ext3
> auto,rw,users 0 0
> c2stable ~ #
>
>   Having done that, as well as making the /mnt/VideoLib mount point,
> my user account can now mount & umount the drive:
>
> mark@c2stable ~ $ mount /mnt/VideoLib/
> mark@c2stable ~ $ df -h | grep VideoLib
> /dev/sdf1       458G  199M  435G   1% /mnt/VideoLib
> mark@c2stable ~ $ umount /mnt/VideoLib/
> mark@c2stable ~ $ df -h | grep VideoLib
> mark@c2stable ~ $
>
>   The problem is that at this point my user account cannot create a
> new directory on that drive:
>
> mark@c2stable ~ $ mount /mnt/VideoLib/
> mark@c2stable ~ $ df -h | grep VideoLib
> /dev/sdf1       458G  199M  435G   1% /mnt/VideoLib
> mark@c2stable ~ $ mkdir /mnt/VideoLib/Video
> mkdir: cannot create directory `/mnt/VideoLib/Video': Permission denied
> mark@c2stable ~ $
>
>   In the past I've gotten around this by having root mount the drive
> and then change ownership to mark:users once it's mounted. Linux
> remembers I've done that once and no longer requires me to do anything
> else as root.
>
>   Is that truly required or is there a way to give the user access to
> the top of the new mount point without roots' involvement?

Have you tried:

# cat /etc/fstab | grep VideoLib
LABEL=VideoLib          /mnt/VideoLib           ext3
auto,rw,users,uid=X,gid=Y 0 0

where X is mark's user id, and Y is users' group id?

On the other hand, do you use a desktop environment? Because GNOME
does everything you want for you, and I suppose KDE does the same.

Regards.
-- 
Canek Peláez Valdés
Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México