Automounting Drives -- The final answer?

[Omy]

To start with, please don't blindly tell me to search. I have. And I've found nothing that actually answers my question, so if I have to search then please tell me exactly what for!?

I have an external usb disk enclosure with a SATA drive formatted with NTFS. When I plug it in it is automounted at /media/<name> where <name> is the volume label of the partition.

I would like to know how to do three things:

- Change the mountpoint
- Change the mount options handed to the ntfs-3g driver (I want a different fmask)
- (Unimportant) Have umount work to unmount the disk rather than having to do some irritating command with devkit-disks that requires the device name rather than allowing the mountpoint and device to be used interchangably.

All of this without affecting the automounting behaviour and without requiring root access to mount. Everything I have tried with the fstab has changed some other behaviour as well.

Cheers,
-ol

[Cuvou]

In Fedora 10 and lower you could set the default mount options by using the gconf editor and editing \system\storage\default_options\ntfs

In Fedora 11 the new DeviceKit service doesn't interact with the gconf anymore so these options are completely useless.

What did you try in fstab? At home my external HDDs are formatted FAT32 and I prefer to have the "shortname=mixed" and "sync" options on them, so I have my fstab looking like this:

UUID=4929-C14C /media/MIDNIGHT vfat noauto,user,rw,nosuid,nodev,uid=500,gid=500,shortname=mixed,dmask=0077,utf8=1,flush,sync

I don't notice any side effects, except that my "MIDNIGHT" volume has 2 icons in the Places menu (one looks like a mounted volume and it opens the /media/MIDNIGHT folder, the other looks like an unmounted volume and it gives an error if I double-click it). I can right-click the mounted volume icon and unmount it that way and then use the other icon to remount it. Besides that, if I unplug the drive both icons disappear, and plug it back in and both icons come back.

Edit
Also on XFCE, this method only results in a single icon per volume, not the 2 icons that I get in gnome - so in XFCE, no adverse side effects at all.

[Omy]

Unfortunately I'm not in a position to do it again and record the exact error messages, but the basic problem seemed to be that if I specified options in /etc/fstab then the mount command (/sbin/mount.ntfs ) is run as my unprivileged user, wheras if I don't specify anything then whatever handles automounting runs the mount command as root.
As Fedora does not install /sbin/mount.ntfs as suid root then, when run as my user, it does not have enough privileges to mount the device. The slightly more bizzare behaviour was that even if I played with udev to make the device be owned by me, and made the mount folder owned by me, then the mount still failed.
Manually making mount.ntfs suid root is not an acceptable solution unless there is some way of telling yum to maintain those permissions: I don't want this to randomly stop working after some update when I've long forgotten what I did to make it work.

Cheers