docs/106148: [PATCH] extend the documentation for handling USB drives

[Roland Smith]

On Sat, Dec 02, 2006 at 10:22:30AM +0100, Marc Fonvieille wrote:

> Your idea is a great improvement to the current section, but I think it
> would be better to use the same scheme as the one used by the FreeBSD
> GNOME team for HAL, i.e, using operator group as in
> http://www.freebsd.org/gnome/docs/faq2.html#q19
> This would keep a consistency between our docs and would be compatible
> with GNOME and other things using HAL.

Here is the new patch, as promised:

---- /usr/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/disks/chapter.sgml patch ----
--- chapter.sgml.orig	Sun Oct  8 17:01:02 2006
+++ chapter.sgml	Sat Dec  2 12:55:30 2006
@@ -777,6 +777,67 @@
       <para>to your configuration file for USB 2.0 support.  Note
 	&man.uhci.4; and &man.ohci.4; drivers are still needed if you
 	want USB 1.X support.</para>
+
+      <para>To make these devices mountable as a normal user, certain steps
+	have to be taken. First, the devices that are created when a USB
+	storage device is connected need to be accessible by the user. A
+	solution is to make all users of these devices a member of the
+	operator group. This is also done with &man.pw.8;. Second, when the
+	devices are created, the operator group should be able to read and
+	write them. This is accomplished by adding a line for these devices
+	to &man.devfs.rules.5;;
+      </para>
+
+      <programlisting>add path 'da*' mode 0660 group operator</programlisting>
+
+      <note>
+	<para>If there already are SCSI disks in the system, it must be
+	  done a bit different. E.g., if the system already contains
+	  disks <filename>da0</filename> through <filename>da2</filename>
+	  attached to the system, change the line as follows:
+	</para>
+
+	<programlisting>add path 'da[3-9]*' mode 0660 group operator</programlisting>
+
+	<para>This will exclude the already existing disks from belonging
+	  to the operator group.
+	</para>
+
+      </note>
+
+      <para>Next, the kernel has to be configured to allow regular users to
+	mount filesystems. The easiest way is to add the following line to
+	&man.sysctl.conf.5;:
+      </para>
+
+      <programlisting>vfs.usermount=1</programlisting>
+
+     <para>Note that this only takes effect after the next
+       reboot. Alternatively, one can also use &man.sysctl.8; to set this
+       variable.
+     </para>
+
+     <para>The final step is to create a directory where the filesystem is
+       to be mounted. This directory needs to be owned by the user that is
+       to mount the filesystem. One way to do that is for root to create a
+       subdirectory owned by that user
+       as <filename>/mnt/$USER</filename> (replace $USER by the login name
+       of the actual user):
+     </para>
+
+    <programlisting>
+mkdir /mnt/$USER
+chown $USER:$USER /mnt/$USER</programlisting>
+
+     <para>Suppose a USB thumbdrives is plugged in, and a
+       device <filename>/dev/da0s1</filename> appears. Since these devices
+       usually come preformatted with a FAT filesystem, one can mount them
+       like this:
+     </para>
+
+     <programlisting>mount_msdosfs -m 644 -M 755 /dev/da0s1
+       /mnt/$USER</programlisting>
+
     </sect2>
 
     <sect2>

---- /usr/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/disks/chapter.sgml patch ----

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
[plain text _non-HTML_ PGP/GnuPG encrypted/signed email much appreciated]
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