mount/fstab: permissions questions

[mikew1368]

I tried searching the forums to see if this was already answered, but no luck.

On my Suse 11.1 computer, I'm only able to run 'mount' as root, but this screws up
the permissions somehow, in that my external drives are now read only when I am
normal user. I can plug my external drives to my mac osx laptop via usb or firewire,
and I can read,write, and execute. As su, I can mount the drives using usb on my suse computer, but only as read only.

Optimally, I want to edit the fstab file to auto mount these external drives, and then
have samba run to make the drives available (i.e. rw) on laptop.

NOTE:
1. I created the file systems on a laptop (mac osx) which has different user name than my suse 11.1 computer.

2. I tried to use chown to manually force user:group to be Mike:users instead of
root:root, but the external drives still are 'read only.' Trying different options in
column 4 fstab file kept giving same trouble, but I can now get user:group = 99: 99
(not sure what that means).

I'll keep hunting around, since I'm sure this is something that others have queried about...

[reed9]

I don't think the permissions have much to do with running mount as root. What filesystem is your external drive formatted to? You're talking about an external drive plugged in via USB, right, not like a networked filesystem?

If you're running GNOME, XFCE, or KDE, external drives normally should just appear on your desktop when they are plugged in. You can set it up to automount them in GNOME and XFCE, KDE has it's own way of doing things, but ultimately you can just click on them to mount.

Here is a good explanation of /etc/fstab and how to use it.

You can use pmount to mount as a user, not sure if it's available is the suse repos though.

[mikew1368]

I use KDE. The drives are external drives. One is formatted as mac os extended journaled, and the other is fat32. I am using usb to connect them.

They do appear on my mac laptop desktop when I plug them in to a usb or firewire port, but I wasn't so luck on my suse 11.1 machine with KDE.

[reed9]

In KDE4, there is a plasmoid called Device Notifier or New Device Notifier. It is usually included on the panel by default in most distros. Check if you have that.

Also, make sure you're a member of the cdrom group.

sudo gpasswd -a <user> cdrom

Where <user> is your username.

For FAT32, you need to have dosfstools installed. The exact package name may differ in suse, though usually this is installed by default.

For HSF+ partitions, I've used a mac maybe once in my life, and never tried to do anything with them in linux. It looks like there may be some issues being able to write to the mac file format.

How to mount Mac OS X hsf+ partition (rw) in Linux – viaFORENSICS - viaForensics

Possibly helpful:
..:: seize the day ::.. :: Workaround for DVD access on openSUSE 11.1 :: December :: 2008

[mikew1368]

my suse 11.1 version of gpasswd only allows for 'l','r', or 'u' option.
'a' is not a valid option.

I am not sure how to look for these tools. I went into yast manager to
see that dosfstools was already installed, but I don't see the specific utility
names or anything associated with dosfstools in the applications or utilities folder. Same with device notifier.

that viaForensics link helped. Seems mac os extended can be read/write permissable with nonjournaled format, but only read with
journaled. the link shows how to make the partition nonjournaled.

So I'm left with trying to figure out how to use the dosfstools package. I reloaded it from yast, but it just seems to the build/install so fast, I can't tell where the objects went, or even what the names are....

[gogalthorp]

you might see if there is a manual or info page

at command line

info dosfstools

or

man dosfstools

[mikew1368]

Nothing came up for dosfstools using info, apropos, or man, but


apropos dos
gave me the dos utility names. Yey...

[gogalthorp]

Use the man/info on the dos file names they should have docs to describe usage