how do i use a memory stick on freebsd?

[Roland Smith]

On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 12:03:42PM -0700, Gary Kline wrote:
> 
> guys, 
> 
> my wife emptied a bunch of files onto her memory stick;  the pc
> is not here.  i have never used one of these devices before and
> want to know how, if it is possible, to read her dos/lose
> material from my bsd system.  7.3, dell, plenty of disk, and yes,
> i know where the usb slot it!
> 
> do i need to put something in /usr/rc.conf? build a driver or
> utility?  or what?

You can mount it as root without having to do anything special. Plug in the
USB stick, and watch dmesg output to see which device appears. Say you see a
device 'da0' appear. Then look in /dev/ to see if there are any slices on it;
'ls /dev/da0*'. You'll probably see one slice, e.g. /dev/da0s1. Then use
mount_msdosfs(8) to mount it somewhere.

If you want to mount as a regular user, things are somewhat more
involved. First, you have to set the sysctl 'vfs.urermount=1'. This has to be
done as root, of course. Then you have to make sure that the user in question
has read/write access to the devices. Generally, I do that by creating a group
called 'usb' with the pw(8) utility, and making users that need access to USB
devices a member of that group. Then I add some lines to /etc/devfs.rules to
make the usb and related devices accessible to that group;

    [my_rules=10]
    add path 'da*' mode 0660 group usb
    add path 'msdosfs/*' mode 0660 group usb
    add path 'usb/*' mode 0660 group usb
    add path 'ugen*' mode 0660 group usb

The latter two lines are to make e.g. digital cameras and scanners accessible.

This ruleset has to be activated in /etc/rc.conf;

    devfs_system_ruleset="my_rules"

You'll need to reboot the system or restart devfs for this to take
effect. With these adaptations, you can mount USB drives as a normal user.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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