Make external hard drive accessible to all users

[Mateusz Marzantowicz]

On 14.07.2012 01:58, Rick Stevens wrote:
> On 07/13/2012 02:37 PM, Mateusz Marzantowicz issued this missive::
>> On 13.07.2012 23:15, Pasha R wrote:
>>> On Sat, Jul 14, 2012 at 12:02 AM, Veli-Pekka Kestilä
>>> <fedora at guagua.fi> wrote:
>>>> On 13.7.2012 23:39, Rick Stevens wrote:
>>>>> On 07/13/2012 01:25 PM, Pasha R issued this missive::
>>>>>> F17 introduced a change to how external drives are mounted. They are
>>>>>> mounted now exclusively to a logged on user. This is somewhat
>>>>>> inconvenient, because iso images stored on external drive is now
>>>>>> inaccessible to virtual machines. Is it possible to make drives
>>>>>> accessible to everyone?
>>>>>
>>>>> Add the mount to /etc/fstab and make sure the "auto" option is
>>>>> included.
>>>>> Something like:
>>>>>
>>>>>      /path/to/device    /mountpoint    ext4      defaults,auto 0 0
>>>>>
>>>> I would use UUID as the device identifier so that if device name
>>>> changes it
>>>> will still mount it correctly.
>>>>
>>>> blkid /dev/sda1 will get you the uuid and then add:
>>>>
>>>> UUID=YOUR-UID         /mountpoint    ext4      defaults,auto     0 0
>>>>
>>> If I understand correctly, this implies that device should be
>>> available at boot time, which is not always the case, since it is
>>> external USB drive.
>>
>> No, there is not such need.
>
> Actually, there is. Pasha is right in that it'll work if the drive is
> plugged in at boot time as the mounting of items in /etc/fstab is done
> at boot. In reality, plug/unplug of devices is geared towards a
> workstation (which is why Fedora behaves the way it does). Pasha's
> thing is more what you'd expect in a server-oriented environment which
> is why I suggested what I did.
>

Sorry but I checked that and I can't agree with you.

I added following line to /etc/fstab:

UUID="25da1476-a0a4-4b87-8afb-8f0ddb128b18"    /mnt    ext4   
defaults    0 0

The uuid is of my flash card (removable storage). Then when I plugged in
the card, it hasn't been mounted automatically. I had to issued: mount
/mnt and umount /mnt manually.

This is exactly what I was talking about. It works in Fedora 17. So you
can mount shared storage not only at boot time. /etc/fstab is not only
proceeded at boot time!


Mateusz Marzantowicz