Make external hard drive accessible to all users

[Pasha R]

On Sat, Jul 14, 2012 at 10:32 AM, Mateusz Marzantowicz
<mmarzantowicz at osdf.com.pl> wrote:
> 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!
>

This is less convenient than in older Fedora versions. I have several
removable drives and also some thumb drives, which I also prefer to
mount system-wide accessible. Now I have to add them all to fstab and
also mount manually. I wonder what was a purpose of the change. Was it
for multi-seat support?