Ubuntu
devicekit-disks package

How do I change the mount options (specifically, permissions) of auto-mounted vfat usb keys?

Asked by Christopher Armstrong

Before Karmic, when I plugged in my USB key, it would mount the vfat filesystem as the user who owned the current X session with permissions restricted to that user.

Since upgrading to Karmic, it still auto-mounts the filesystem as the current user, but now it uses world-readable permissions.

This is problematic for me because I keep my SSH private key on the filesystem. Of course, not only is it a security issue, but practically, ssh-add refuses to accept a key which is world-readable.

I *think* there used to be a way to set mount options with nautilus if you right-clicked the volume and went to properties, but no such setting exists in Karmic. I've tried "palimpset" ("Disk Utility" in system->administration) but it doesn't have any way to set mount options. I've read man pages for DeviceKit-disks and devkit-disks and devkit-disks-daemon, and while devkit-disks appears to have a way to mount a device with particular options, it doesn't seem to have a way to set the mount options in a persistent way.

Do I have to edit udev configuration files, or something?

Alternatively, could the default settings in Karmic be changed back to only allowing the current user to see the device?

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Christopher Armstrong (radix) said : 		#1

Sorry, I typoed "palimpsest" above.

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#2

You can use the UUID of the disk in /etc/fstab (which can be determined with sudo blkid)

If you create a folder in /media for each storage device you use, you can use the fstab file to tell the system how to mount the device there. I'm sure there is a more graceful way but I personally dont like automount and prefer to mount things how I want, rather than what the OS thinks I want.

Maybe someone else has a more graceful method but thats how I'd do it.

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Maxim Kalinin (kalinin-maxim) said : 		#3

That's weird. I have the opposite problem: I want the automounted USB drives to be readable for everyone, but they aren't. (I'm at lucid currently, but I remember clearly that with Karmic it was the same.) I tried setting umask=0777 in HAL config (/usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/20-storage-methods.fdi), but it didn't help.

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Jochen Fahrner (jofa) said : 		#4

I have the same problem. I would like to add the "noatime" option for mounting optical media (DVD-RAM). Without "noatime" timestamps are written on every read access, slowing down read speed and waering the media.
The same ist true for flash memory media.

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