For some reason, I have not seen this issue summarized elsewhere. . .
I have a second hard drive installed in my computer (F10, kernel 2.6.27.29-170.2.78.fc10.i686) with an ext3 partition that I'd like to mount, unmount, read, and write as a normal user. So I (console output slightly edited):
Made a mount point in /media:
[root@desk media]# mkdir drive2
[root@desk media]# chown bill:os drive2
[root@desk media]# chmod 777 drive2
[root@desk media]# ll
drwxrwxrwx 2 bill os 4096 2009-08-07 13:51 drive2
Added a line to /etc/fstab:
/dev/sdb10 /media/drive2 ext3 rw,suid,dev,exec,noauto,users,async 0 0
Now, when "drive2" is mounted, the ownership and permissions of the mount point change (and revert back when it is unmounted):
[bill@desk media]$ ll
drwxrwxrwx 2 bill os 4096 2009-08-07 13:51 drive2
[bill@desk media]$ mount drive2
[bill@desk media]$ ll
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2009-08-07 12:30 drive2
[bill@desk media]$ umount drive2
[bill@desk media]$ ll
drwxrwxrwx 2 bill os 4096 2009-08-07 13:51 drive2
Under these conditions, a normal user can not write to the partition.
The trick to fix this is to change the ownership and permissions of the mount point as desired (in the case below, only the ownership was changed) WHILE THE PARTITION IS MOUNTED. Then behavior is as expected:
[bill@desk media]$ ll
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2009-08-07 13:51 drive2
[bill@desk media]$ mount drive2
[bill@desk media]$ ll
drwxr-xr-x 3 bill os 4096 2009-08-07 12:30 drive2
[bill@desk media]$ umount drive2
[bill@desk media]$ ll
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2009-08-07 13:51 drive2
This fix persists after reboot. One odd feature remains: despite the "noauto" in fstab, the partition is mounted automatically on boot, and an icon for it appears on the desktop. Don't know why.
So, it appears that something is altering the documented behavior of mount and fstab. gvfs?
Hope this helps you.
Edit: For a good solution to the problem of gnome/hal (or whatever) overriding a "noauto" option for a partition in fstab, see
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=217124. I'm just a knuckle-dragging end-user, but, to my eye, the beauty of Fedora is that its workings can be understood on the basis of easily-available documentation, i.e., you don't have to psychoanalyse it, and you don't have to try to guess what some coder was thinking ten years ago in Redmond, WA. If a sysadmin sticks a "noauto" option in fstab, I vote that the operating system respect that.
Linear Mode
