Problem mounting a USB flashdrive on Intrepid

[Nils Kassube]

Leonard Chatagnier wrote:
> --- On Thu, 12/4/08, Nils Kassube <kassube at gmx.net> wrote:
> > From: Nils Kassube <kassube at gmx.net>
> > Subject: Re: Problem mounting a USB flashdrive on Intrepid
> > To: ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
> > Date: Thursday, December 4, 2008, 1:34 AM
> >
> > Leonard Chatagnier wrote:
> > > Your message suggest your wife's user name needs
> >
> > to be added to the
> >
> > > disk group or some other appropriate group.
> >
> > The appropriate group definitely isn't
> > "disk". A user in the disk group
> > would have direct write access to the raw device nodes of
> > all disks.
> > A "normal" user in the disk group could easily
> > overwrite entire disks.
>
> Ok. I see that group shows disk:x:6: without my uid on it. I thought I
> had my uid or added it at one time but haven't looked at group since
> installing intrepid. So, what is the appropriate group listing in this
> case. I would like to know for my education. 

Meanwhile we have read already that the solution of the original problem 
was an fstab entry and not the group membership. If you have a look at 
the device nodes of a USB flash drive you can see the permissions are rw 
for owner root and group disk. I suppose that was the reason why you 
suggested the disk group. But the disk is mounted via HAL (sorry, I don't 
know the details) and the user only gets permission to read/write to the 
mounted file system, not to the raw device.

> In my case I wouldn't feel 
> threatened as I'm user, admin, root whatever and responsible for what I
> do. But that's my problem-:))

My original reply was merely sent to remind others that it is risky to 
become member of the disk group. If you are member of the disk group you 
just have to be very careful with every copy / move etc. command and make 
sure you don't accidentally overwrite your disks. It is similar to 
executing all those commands as root.


Nils