Mounting USB flash disk in read only mode

Question

I have a Fedora 15 box, which is on a public network. How do I configure it such that when non-root users plug in a USB drive, the box mounts it as a read-only device.

Answer 1

Typical Fedora installation uses gnome-volume-manager. I suggest you look into that. I use KDE and it has it's own Device Manager.

Alternatively, you can of course create an entry to /etc/fstab manually and give it the permissions and options you want. Relevant mount options in this case would be ro user auto.

Answer 2

You probably want to look for udev rules, check here for example https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Udev

See also the last example on http://www.linuxforu.com/2012/06/some-nifty-udev-rules-and-examples/ , as it shows how to spawn your own script when a USB drive is connected. From there, you could even open a popup to warn the user at this stage and mount or remount the USB drive accordingly (eg. with mount -o remount -r /mymountpoint)