(auto)mounting removable media as user
Wednesday, December 13th, 2006I’ve always been bothered by the fact that you need to be root to mount anything (like an usb stick). It can be solved a bit by setting up udev rules and putting a specific device in /etc/fstab, but that only works for that single usb stick. Pretty annoying.
Googling only gives you stupid and silly solution (like allowing users to mount /dev/sd[a-z] — security risk).
Luckily I’ve recently been pointed to ivman, which is an automounter. It automatically mounts removable media for you in /media.
I looked at the internals of ivman, and noticed that it uses pmount, which is a wrapper around mount which allows users to mount removable media on a /media folder. Great!
Btw, you need to be in the plugdev group to use pmount.
Update It seems that gnome-mount also works fine when you’re in the plugdev group. Gnome-mount does about the same as pmount with the advantage that gnome-mount has got the nice gui integration everywhere in gnome.