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Removing USB entry in /etc/fstab in standard installations



Hi,

I had problems a while ago with several USB sticks on Debian Jessie. For all non-root users they were automounted read-only. But there was no way of writing something onto the sticks for a non-privileged user. Fiddling around with user permissions and such didn't help. The simple solution finally was to comment out the following line in /etc/fstab:

/dev/sdb1       /media/usb0     auto    rw,user,noauto  0       0

After commenting out this line all normal users could write to all USB sticks, just as you would expect it to work. Someone suggested that the fstab entry existed in the first place because I had installed Jessie from a USB stick as root, but I can't judge that.

If you look in the forums, many people face the same problem - they can read, but not write to a USB stick plugged in. The same solution as above works for them. Examples:

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=119254
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=119061
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=119423
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=107470

So I have two questions now:

1. Is it necessary/a good thing that in a standard Debian installation this /etc/fstab USB entry appears?
2. Can developers or maintainers do something about this issue, so that novice users don't experience the same problems as I and several others did? I think being able to write to an USB stick should work out of the box for a non-root user. Perhaps there are ways to not let the fstab entry appear at all if it isn't necessary or remove it after installation.

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