Can't share "/mnt/volume"

[Longman, Bill]

> How do I allow users, other than ROOT, to SEE, and USE, the 
> contents of
> mounted volumes? Along a similar vein, why is it that, at 
> start up (when
> all the linux text is scrolling past my screen,"Updating /etc/fstab"
> always fails?\Any ideas?

Ned, it's certainly typical for filesystems to be mounted only by root. You
can add the "user" flag in the fstab file as one of the mount options on a
given filesystem. Then whoever mounts it can unmount it. You can go crazy
and use the "users" option, too. Then any ole user can mount and unmount at
will. Sometimes this is not advisable....

In your case, you need to mount the filesystem on an existing directory. For
instance, if in your fstab it says:

/dev/hda9 /mnt/volume hfs auto 1 1

then you'll have to make sure the /mnt/volume directory exists. Furthermore,
the lone empty directory, /mnt/volume, as it exists *in the root directory*
has its own permissions separate and distinct from the permissions that the
filesystem acquires once it gets mounted there.

Look what happens when I mount my ISO image:

$ cd /
$ ls -ld cd1
drwxrwxr-x    2 root   root   4096 Jul  2 10:45 cd1/
$ mount /cd1
$ ls -ld cd1
dr-xr-xr-x    9 root   root   4096 Mar 17 08:05 cd1/

This might help you solve the problem of getting others to mount and use
filesystems. I don't know why the /etc/fstab error is appearing at boot,
though. I suspect it might be from system device probes trying to add
available entries in there (like USB drives, etc.).

Bill