FC3: Problems with mounting USB harddisk

[Paul Howarth]

On Fri, 2004-12-10 at 09:20 +0100, Stephan Groß wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 9. Dezember 2004 22:06 schrieb Terry Polzin:
> 
> First of all, with this last posting I am moving my enquiry to fedora-list as 
> I seem to bother some guys on this list with an FC3 topic. I am sorry for 
> being off-topic here though I believe this problem still persists in FC4 (I 
> do not have the time to test this).
> 
> > On Thursday 09 December 2004 15:57, Stephan Groß wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I'm trying to use my external USB harddisk under FC3. When I plug in the
> > > disk it is recognized by hald and the /etc/fstab is (correctly) modified
> > > (see attachment). But if an unpriviledged user mounts one of the ext3
> > > partitions he only has read access but no write access on it. Only root
> > > is alowed to read AND write to the partition. If the partition is
> > > formated as FAT the user mounting it has both read and write access to
> > > it. Short question: Is it possible to get read-write access for ext3
> > > partitions and if yes, how must I adjust my config?
> > >
> > > Thank you for some advice.
> > >
> > > Regards,
> > > Stephan.
> >
> > What are the permissions on
> >
> > /media
> > /media/usbdisk
> 
> They are (of course) owned by root and only writable for root but if I mount a 
> FAT-partition, the ownership is changed automatically to the user who mounted 
> it. So, to render my question more precisely: Why isn't the ownership of a 
> mounted ext3 partition not ajusted to the id of the mounting user?

FAT filesystems have no concept of user/group, so the driver has to
decide which user/group should "own" the files.

Unix filesystems do understand users and groups and so the ownership of
the files is already specified - no need for the driver to do anything
special. If the files on the USB disk have the same UID as your
unprivileged user and the permissions for the file allow writing by that
UID, the unprivileged user should be able to write to them.

Paul.
-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>