Make external hard drive accessible to all users

[Rick Stevens]

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.

If the device is going to be plugged in after boot and you don't want
to require human intervention to actually mount the device, then rules
need to be written for udev to monitor the USB device and perform the
mount when the device is plugged in. udev rules work best on pluggable
stuff when they're keyed against some immutable thing in the device
being plugged in (e.g. a UUID on the filesystem).

Unplugging the device and having udev unmount it can cause issues as
you can't necessarily do a "umount" if the device (filesystem) is busy.
Even "umount -f" only works on NFS volumes most of the time--not always.
This is why you generally don't have easily-removable items in a server
farm (it says here in small print).
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- Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer, AllDigital    ricks at alldigital.com -
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-   You possess a mind not merely twisted, but actually sprained.    -
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