[LAD] OT: mkdosfs as normal user

Patrick Shirkey pshirkey at boosthardware.com
Thu Nov 13 03:27:08 UTC 2008


Patrick Shirkey wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 23:30 -0600, David M. Creswick wrote:
>   
>> On Tue, 11 Nov 2008 09:53:17 +0700
>> Patrick Shirkey <pshirkey at boosthardware.com> wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> Joern Nettingsmeier wrote:
>>>       
>>>> Patrick Shirkey wrote:
>>>>   
>>>>         
>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>
>>>>> I can't find anything online that gives me a way to run /sbin/mkdosfs as
>>>>> a normal user. 
>>>>>
>>>>> Is it just that I need to add the user to the mkdosfs group or something
>>>>> similar?
>>>>>     
>>>>>           
>>>> are you sure the program itself prevents that? my guess is it's the
>>>> device you want to create the file on.
>>>>
>>>> should be a matter of creating a new group disk_removable or something,
>>>> writing an udev rule to give it r/w access to all floppies and usb
>>>> sticks and add yourself to that group.
>>>>
>>>>   
>>>>         
>>> Thanks for the tip.
>>>
>>> I'm working on it now.
>>>
>>> However this seems like a major oversight from a Linux on the desktop 
>>> perspective that you need to be root user to format a removable disk. It 
>>> would make sense that Nautilus or Konqueror  would have built in support 
>>> by now.
>>>
>>> Does anyone have experience with any distros/apps allowing this as 
>>> normal user?
>>>
>>> It seems like it should be a no brainer.
>>>
>>>       
>> I think Joern is correct in that all you need is read+write permissions
>> on the device node. Under debian etch, the group is set to "floppy" for
>> device nodes of removable usb storage devices. I imagine other distros
>> do something similar. So the user should just have to be a member of
>> the floppy (or equivalent) group to run mkdosfs on the device.
>>
>>
>>     
>
> Thanks for the tip. I ran this command:
>
> /usr/sbin/usermod -a -G floppy username
>
> On Fedora9 at least the floppy group does not control removeable disks.
>
> I also tried the disk group but nothing...
>
> Any other suggestions?
>   
The solution appears to have been to reboot because now I can run 
mkdosfs as normal user.


Cheers.

-- 
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd.






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