 | | | USB utilities | USB utilities 2005-03-23 - By Stephen Gardner
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On Wed, 23 Mar 2005, Akop Pogosian wrote:
> I am often being asked is whether there exist utilities that allow
> users to mount USB storage devices without superuser's intervention.
> Does such thing exist on RHEL 3? What about RHEL 4?
Akop,
This is certainly very easy under RHEL4 which uses a combination
of the hald process to detect the insertion of the USB storage device
and fstab-sync to create the appropriate line in fstab to enable the
device to be mounted by the user on console. RHEL4 has a /media directory
into which user mountable CDROM, USB storage etc mount points are
created.
Under RHEL3 there are a couple of options I can think of. Firstly
a crude option is to attempt to minic the RHEL4 /media directory
with an entry in /etc/fstab something similar to
/dev/sda /media/usbdevice auto user,noauto,unhide,sync 0 0
[ change /dev/sda to suit your system, it's where my USB device ends up ]
This doesn't always work as auto-detecting the filesystem can be
problematic. The "user" option allows a user to mount and unmount the
device. You can have problems with a user forgetting to unmount the device
and simply removing the storage device. Changing that option to "users"
will allow any user (not just the person who mounted it originally) to
mount and unmount the device (NOTE: if you allow remote logins this can
allow a remote user to unmount a local users filesystem). The "user"(s)
option sets some sensible security defaults, see mount(8) man pages for
more details.
Secondly there's the automounter. A quick-and-dirty guide would be to have
a line in /etc/auto.master like
/media /etc/auto.media --timeout=120
Then create a file called /etc/auto.media containing
usbdevice -fstype=auto,nosuid,nodev,sync :/dev/sda
[ change /dev/sda to suit your system, it's where my USB device ends up ]
Then when a user goes into the /media/usbdevice it'll get mounted
automatically. Plus after 2 minutes of inactivity the device will be
unmounted. autofs(5) is worth reading.
One note of warning about all of the above is that if you plan to perform
an upgrade to RHEL4 from RHEL3 (rather than a clean install) and use some
of the above suggestions they will cause conflicts with the internal RHEL4
functions. If that's a possibility avoid using the /media and choose
another location.
Regards,
Stephen
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