Success!.......Well, sort of.

[Pimp Daddy]

Following a thread I read on this forum I managed to find a way of getting my external hard disk to appear in the devices section of Konqueror. That isn't the problem though. Now I've done that I can remember the changes I made to the line so I could access it as a non root user. I looked through the manual again and now I'm having to go through all the combinations until I get the right one. This time though, instead of constantly typing it in the Konsole, I'm going to add a line to the fstab.

In the Konsole I typed:

mount -t auto -o rw,users,umask=0033 /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb

As I understand it, 'rw' gives read/write capabilities, /dev/sda1 is the name Linux gives it because of SCSI emulation (despite there being an IDE drive inside the enclosure). /mnt/usb is the substitute for /dev/sda1. 'users' or 'user' allows a non root user to mount the device. If I were to put owner in the the only person who could unmount the device is the one who mounted it in the first place. As for umask, I'm not sure whether it should be 0000,000 or 0033. You'll have to explain that one to me.

It would be great if you could tell me what is wrong with that line and what to do so I can allow it to be accessed by a non-root user.

[sarumont]

That line should do it. What error(s)/problem(s) are you having?

[monkey8]

"man 8 mount" tells you want the mask is. I believe that should end up setting the user permissions as 744. (I'm not sure about the leading zero...)

Is the problem you cant read, or you want any user to write to it?

[Pimp Daddy]

Thanks for the help but I managed to fix it early this morning. The line I used to mount it via the prompt was:

mount -t auto -o rw,users,umask=0000 /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb

and the line I put in the fstab reads:

/dev/sda1    /mnt/usb    auto    rw,users,umask=0000     0  0

[sarumont]

The leading 0 is for the SUID bit. It's not really required in a umask arg (esp for mounting a USB drive), but it's good practice to put it there and know what it's for.

[monkey8]

Since its a mask, would that make the SUID bit 7? Is that okay?

[sarumont]

Actually...I was incorrect. You cannot specify SUID in a umask...this would be very unsecure. Let's just pretend that my mind was temporarily possessed by aliens earlier.

That is the STICKY bit. With this bit set to 1, only the creator (owner) of the file can delete it (even if they have write access). With a sticky bit on a directory, you must own a file in the dir to delete it even if you have write access to the dir itself.

Sorry about the confusion...I promise I will never be wrong again.