USB stick with ext2?

[Mikkel L. Ellertson]

Ed Greshko wrote:
> Alan Evans wrote:
>> Howdy!
>>
>> When I insert a USB thumb drive formatted with vfat, it gets
>> automagically mounted under /media with appropriate permissions so the
>> logged in user can write to the device. But if the thumb drive is
>> formatted ext2, only root can write to it.
>>
>> $ mount
>> /dev/sdb1 on /media/Devel type ext2 (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal)
>> /dev/sdc1 on /media/disk type vfat
>> (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal,shortname=lower,uid=500)
>> $ ll
>> total 20
>> drwxr-xr-x 3 root root  4096 2009-01-05 21:27 Devel
>> drwxr-xr-x 3 alan root 16384 1969-12-31 16:00 disk
>>
>> Is there a way to make that work?
>>
>>
>>   
> With the USB mounted become root....  Then "chown alan /media/disk". 
> The ownership information is maintained in the ext2 structure.  So, the
> next time it is mounted it will retain ownership by alan.
> 
One thing to keep in mind if you do this - if you move the drive to
another machine where the UID and GID for alan are different, you
will not be able to access the drive as alan. The owner/group
settings are the number, not the name, of the user/group.

You may want to use chown alan:alan /media/Devel instead of chown
alan /media/disk. This will set both the owner and group of the
disk. In this case, I would not use the -R option - I do not know
what the affect of changing the ownership of /media/Devel/lost+found
would be.

You also have the option of creating a directory on the USB drive
owned by alan. That way, you could have storage for more then one
user on the drive.

Mikkel
-- 

  Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!

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