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

[Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com>]

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?

Thanks,
Mark