Can't Mount USB Drive As User Under FreeBSD 10

[Michael Powell]

Erich Dollansky wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On Fri, 14 Feb 2014 04:39:46 +0000
> B J <va6bmj at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> I've had problems configuring the machine to mount external USB
>> drives.  I can mount USB thumb drives when logged in as root using:
>> 
>> mount -t msdosfs -o -m=644,-M=755 /dev/da0s1 /mnt/root
> 
> this hints that just some of your access rights are wrong. Just ask a
> search engine for allowing user to mount devices.
> 
> You need to be able to read and write to /dev/da0s1 as a user if you
> want to allow users to mount it.
[snip]

These permissions are generally set in /etc/devfs.conf. Check out the man 
page for devfs.conf. In the Handbook is some more info regarding the use of 
devfs.rules:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/usb-disks.html

You may need to place vfs.usermount=1 in your sysctl.conf as well. I've only 
ever used the devfs.conf in the past for very simple configs on machines 
only I control, which is probably not a very secure approach. Perhaps the 
additional devfs.rules (it has a man page too) info from the Handbook page 
is a better way to go as it seems like it has better security in mind.

-Mike