I am running SUSE 11.3 on both my desktop and my laptop. Up until recently, I have been able to access all of my thumb drives regardless of whether I was logged in as myself or root. Recently, however, my desktop, while registering the thumb drive when I plug it in, won’t let me access it unless I am logged in as root. I am not having this problem on the laptop.
When I try, as root, to change the permissions to allow access by everyone, I get the message that I do not have sufficient access to make the changes. This is true whether I try to change the whole drive or only a single file.
I realize that the thumb drive is formatted in FAT32 and doesn’t really carry permissions, so why do I run into this problem? Anyone got any ides and suggestions on how to fix it?
oldpopsie, so I have no idea what is wrong, but I took the same USB thumb drive I own and plugged it into a copy of openSUSE 11.3 and then into openSUSE 11.4 RC1. It is my understanding that the move from 11.3 to 11.4 finds HAL gone or less used while UDEV is more used. Now perhaps one of our schollers will come by and tell exactly the story, but I was not able to uncover just what governs the rules for automounting thumb drives. I did see that in openSUSE 11.3 the drive was mounted under media as the Disk Label of the thumb drive. The permissions starting with the label name said user: james and group was root. On openSUSE 11.4 I found that again it was mounted under the media folder as the disk label name, and the user was again my name of james but the group now is users. In both cases I could write to, delete or copy any file.
I scanned many messages for files to look at between the two systems in openSUSE , but everything I found was identical between the two versions. So, when you plug in a USB thumb drive on your computer, tell us the folder name used below media, the user name and the group name assigned to it and if this disk even as a disk label name.
Thank You,
So still looking to figure this out. I find that there is a file called mtab in the /etc folder (/etc/mtab) that contains the mount command for the Thumb Drive. This is the line I get in openSUSE 11.4:
/dev/sdc1 /media/MYLINUXLIVE vfat rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,uid=1000,gid=100,fmask=0022,dmask=0077,codepage=cp437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,showexec,utf8,errors=remount-ro 0 0
and in openSUSE 11.3 I get the line:
/dev/sdd1 /media/MYLINUXLIVE vfat rw,nosuid,nodev,uid=1000,utf8,shorthname=mixed,flush 0 0
The mtab file was said to work with autofs, but this program does not seem to be running on either PC, but the difference in these two commands might indicate something as well as what you see in your mtab file only while the thumb Drive is attached. You must be root to look at this file.
Thank You,
Actually not:
kalle@hoppers:~> whoami
kalle
kalle@hoppers:~> cat /etc/mtab
/dev/sdb1 / ext4 rw,acl,user_xattr 0 0
proc /proc proc rw 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs rw 0 0
...]
I don’t think that this will be handled differently in openSUSE 11.4 (my example was executed in 11.2). However, remember that the 11.4 is still in development, so actually it is not a good platform to show the status quo of basic filesystem-management.
Hi oldpopsie. Which desktop environment are you using? I’ve seen a few Gnome threads on this topic recently. With the device plugged, get the name of it (as root)
fdisk -l
If its /dev/sdb1 for example, type the following (as regular user is ok now)
udisks --show-info /dev/sdb1
You can try mounting with
udisks --mount /dev/sdb1
Report any errors. Let us know it goes.