Quick tip: User-mounted filesystems with "exec" (Shallow Thoughts)

Quick tip: User-mounted filesystems with "exec"

Second time I've run into this -- time to write it down.

Trying to run debootstrap to install the new Ubuntu beta, I kept hitting a snag right at the beginning: debootstrap kept saying the filesystem was mounted with the wrong permissions, and it couldn't create an executable file or a device.

I have lines for each of my spare filesystems in /etc/fstab, like this:

/dev/sda4  /lucid  ext3  relatime,user,noauto  0   0

That way, if I'm booted into one OS but I want to check a file from another, I can mount it without needing sudo, just by typing mount /lucid.

Not being able to create executable files means it's mounted with the noexec flag. I checked another machine and saw that it was using lines like

/dev/sda4  /lucid  ext3  exec,user,noauto  0   0

I added the "exec," to fstab, unmounted and remounted ... and it was still mounted with noexec.

Turns out on some Linux versions, making a filesystem user mountable turns off exec even if you've specified it explicitly. You have to add the exec after the user.

But that still didn't make debootstrap happy, because it couldn't create a device. That's a separate fstab option, dev, and user implies nodev.

So here's the fstab entry that finally worked:

/dev/sda4  /lucid  ext3  relatime,user,exec,dev,noauto  0   0

Tags: linux, filesystem, fstab, tips
[ 23:07 Apr 01, 2010    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]