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So far, when I have attached the Transcend external media player to USB port of my Ubuntu 12.04 machine, it always got mounted with the ownership of current user, permitting all write operations. But suddenly, this device is being mounted with root ownership. This makes all write operations not permitted unless you become the root user. That it not something I will want to permit to everyday users.

Anyway, /etc/mtab shows the device mounted like this,

/dev/sde /media/usb0 vfat rw,noexec,nodev,sync,noatime,nodiratime 0 0
/dev/sdd /media/usb1 vfat rw,noexec,nodev,sync,noatime,nodiratime 0 0

There is no entry for this in /etc/fstab so the scenario is happening from a default setting after recent upgrade.

Further details on the device (df -hT),

/dev/sde       vfat      922M  385M  537M  42% /media/usb0
/dev/sdd       vfat      7.3G  7.1G  229M  97% /media/usb1

The other usb devices like external hard drives get mounted with the ownership of current user, no problem.

After mounting of the Transcend device, the operations

sudo chown -vR <user>:<user> /media/usb0
sudo chown -vR <user>:<user> /media/usb1

failed, as they should.

I have already taken a look at these answers, 1, 2, 3, without any avail.

As intructed in the last one, I even tried running the command, 

sudo usermod -a -G plugdev,fuse masroor

But that did not improve the scenario.

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Masroor
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1 Answers1

1

After a long search and agony, I found from here that usbmount was the offending package causing all this unnecessary trouble.

Once I uninstalled usbmount,

sudo apt-get purge usbmount

things are good again.

It appears that usbmount is not even needed in a desktop version. It is needed in a server though. And the mount-as-root feature in a server is very much applicable.

I am not sure how usbmount was installed in my machine.

Masroor
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