Make external hard drive accessible to all users

[Pasha R]

On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 8:34 PM, Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com> wrote:
> 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.
>>
> Many of us on this list suffer from literalism, meaning we think what you
> said is what you meant. Had you said "removable" rather than "external" it
> might have helped people understand your problem.

Sorry if I misled someone.

>
> In any case, for extN filesystems if you provide a label (tune2fs if you
> didn't create one) it seems to get mounted on /media/label nicely. Don't
Do you use F17 or one of the previous releases? The change of mounting
in /run/media/$USER/label was introduced in F17 and that's what it
actually does.

> know for sure about MS filesystems, but given that my new USB drives always
> have the same name no matter where I plug them in, I suspect the ugly string
> is a label of some kind, and you could use that, perhaps even change it to
> something you like better.
>
> Once you get it mounted in the same place every time, you can use symlinks
> if you don't like the name.
>
My problem is not the place where it is mounted. The problem is that
drive is mounted exclusively for user owning the session, so it is
accessible only by that user or root. But ,for example, virtual
machines that run by default as 'qemu' user, have no access to that
drive, so for example I can't boot them with CD image located on that
drive.