After I had setup my usb drive to automatically mount when plugged in, I realized that the only person who could use it was root.
I needed to change the permissions so that my user could use it (or any user for that matter), which can be specified in the mount command using the -o option.
mount -t deviceFileFormat -o umask=filePermissons,gid=ownerGroupID,uid=ownerID /device /mountpoint
Note that it asks for a umask, which is actually the inverse of the binary permission value (see wikipedia). Additionally, it wants user and group ids, not the names.
To find a speific user’s user id, use
$ id -u username
To find a specific user’s group id, use
$ id -g username
To see all the groups a user belongs too
$ groups username
To get a corresponding list of those group’s ids,
$ id -G username
I decided that I wanted the owner to be the “default” user instead of root, and the group to be anyone in the users group. The “default” user is the first one created on the system, and should have id 1000, and the users group should have id 100. The owner and group members would have full rwx permissions, while everyone else would just have r-x.
The resulting command was
$ sudo mount -o umask=0002,uid=1000,gid=100 /dev/sda1 /storage