Category: GENERAL

Automatic partition mounting in GNU/Linux

Anoop C SLeave a comment

Screenshot from 2013-05-10 12:12:30

After the installation of a GNU/Linux system by default the partitions are not automatically mounted. Nowadays GNU/Linux ditros are competing to improve the external appearance. As a result just one mouse-click is enough to mount a partition.Even though it can be set to automatically mount during system boot. Apart from these you can set permissions over the contents of a particular partition with the help of /etc/fstab file. Basic structure of fstab file is as follows.

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use ‘blkid’ to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    nodev,noexec,nosuid 0       0
# / was on /dev/sda10 during installation
UUID=3fc4638a-eeef-4315-91a6-fee625d5c428 /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# swap was on /dev/sda8 during installation
UUID=0b1f3624-acef-4d85-ba88-34addf72df4c none            swap    sw              0       0

If you have a partition as /dev/sda1 with ntfs(vfat for FAT32) on the system, you can add that file system in the above file as follows and save the same. At your next reboot partition will be automatically mounted.

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use ‘blkid’ to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    nodev,noexec,nosuid 0       0
/dev/sda1       /media/vol1     ntfs    defaults        0       0
# / was on /dev/sda10 during installation
UUID=3fc4638a-eeef-4315-91a6-fee625d5c428 /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# swap was on /dev/sda8 during installation
UUID=0b1f3624-acef-4d85-ba88-34addf72df4c none            swap    sw              0       0

Note:- For doing this automatic mount you must first create a /media/vol1 directory as a mount point (sudo mkdir /media/vol1).
For setting permissions on the partition you can edit the defaults entry to something like rw,noexec,exec,…
You can set permissions for a particular user using uid=<uid> and umask=<octadecimal_no>.

Add users to sudo to “root” account

Anoop C SLeave a comment

“george is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.”

Some of you may have encountered an error similar to one listed above. Most of us then switches to root account and perform the requires operations. But it is possible for users to take up the root privileges through the sudo command by editing the sudo configuration file. If you want to make, for example, the user ‘george’ be able to sudo to “root”, use the following command:

su (and enter the root password)
nano /etc/sudoers

Move to the section where the following is written

# User privilege specification
root    ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

Edit the file to look like

# User privilege specification
root    ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
george  ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

Save the file. Now ‘george’ can use the sudo command without any error.