Re: Removing USB entry in /etc/fstab in standard installations
On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 7:46 AM, Christoph Baumhardt <xt440s@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
Thanks you! I'd puzzled over that for quite a while, but never been
sufficiently bothered to seek out a solution (as I can always use sudo
or become root to do what needed to be done). Once the offending line
is commented out (in my case, 2 such lines, one assigning /dev/sdc1 to
/media/usb0, the other assigning /dev/sdc2 to /media/usb1) my USB
stick mounted to /media/<user>/USB DISK/ and is owned by me (where
<user> is my username).
So, thanks again.
> 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?
It is certainly not a good thing after installation, as it obviously
breaks expected behavior.
> 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.
I agree.
Thanks again for the information.
Patrick
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