The current actually working is that I can plug in a flash drive - wait a moment - and the files become accessible to and from it. That is sometimes! At other times I'm sure I'm doing damage because the device appears to be unmounted and will not have the files seen, but when I do mount it manually, root can see the files but user cannot, making me think at times that I have wiped the flash drive. Further, the Howto's I followed allowed me to have any device I plugged in recognized for what it is within /mnt - but that has never worked since the first reboot though all the files appear to be in place. The very first time I tried to test my work, this actually did work, and often whilst I was within that session.If you set up rules for udev to give specific names to USB devices, in place of the names the kernel gives them, you will break the automounting that hotplug does. You can create your own rules to handle the mounting in place of the standard ones. This allows you to control how things get mounted. For example, when you plug in a PNY memory stick, you can have it get mounted on /mnt/pny instead /dev/removable. (Don't ask for the full details yet - I am still playing with this.) You can get more specific, and do things like have 32MB sticks mount one place, and 64MB mount in another. Basicly, you can test any of the tags that udev know about, and build rules based on them.
( I used the
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other-formats/html_single/Flash-Memory-HOWTO.html#linux-2.6
to install udev - it's quite conclusive.)
While mounting specific memory devices in specific places may not be real usuefull, when you start talking about USB hard drives, that is another story. If you have more then one partition on the drive, then current hotplug code will not mount it. Also, if you have requirments that different partitions on the drive be mounted in specific places, you can handle them this way. Maybe one partition needs to mount on /backup, and another on /opt/pictures, or something like that.
Now, as far as users being able to access files on USB storage devices, it depends on how you mount them. If you just do something like
"mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/removable", then your users will not be able to access the files. But if you do something like
"mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/removable -o umask=0", then they will have access.
Using sda1 may not be the best choice in this example, as if you plug in a USB "PEN" drive, and it uses the default device, it will get automounted, but I think you get the idea. If you have udev set to create something like /dev/pen and /dev/pen1, then use pen1 in place of sda1, and it will work.
Mikkel --
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!
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