Can't mount RAMFS in /etc/fstab with proper permissions.

[DavidGX]

I'm fairly new to Mint, although I've dabbled with Ubuntu in the past. I can't, for the life of me, for any amount of internet searching, figure out how to set up /etc/fstab to mount a RAMFS type RAM drive on boot and have it readable/writeable by anyone but root.

I've tried with two different directories, /media/ramdisk and /ramdisk. I made the directories first, did "sudo chown /directory/here username:username" and the folders showed the proper permissions, great. But if I add RAMFS to the /etc/fstab it always becomes root access only when it mounts the RAM drive. I've tried many, many different configurations and variations of the fstab entry, including my newest one "ramfs /ramdisk ramfs defaults 0 0" but that doesn't work, none of them do. I've tried mounting THEN using chown, nothing. I've tried letting /etc/fstab mount it for me THEN using chown, again, nothing.

What am I doing wrong?

[xenopeek]

I'm not familiar with ramfs, but reading this makes me think it isn't what you want. If you want a temporary fle system, mounted in memory and writable by normal users, then use tmpfs. On the manpage for mount ("man mount") you can find that ramfs has no mount options, while tmpfs has option to set its size and mode, amongst others. See the manpage for more details.

As an example, let's create a directory /mnt/ramdisk:

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sudo mkdir /mnt/ramdisk

Then let's add a line to /etc/fstab (edit it as root) to add a 1 GiB tmpfs on which normal users can write files:

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none /mnt/ramdisk tmpfs nodev,nosuid,size=1Gi,mode=1777 0 0

The nodev and nosuid are a security measure, meaning only normal files will be allowed. The size sets the maximum size, with it dynamically growing up to that size as needed. The mode sets the same mode as the /tmp directory, which allows all users access to it. More details on these in the aforementioned manpage.

Finally, activate your new mount:

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sudo mount -a

Now you have 1 GiB temporary file system, mounted in memory and writable by normal users, located at /mnt/ramdisk. It won't show up in your file browser as a separate file system. If you want that, replace /mnt with /media instead and the file browser will treat it as a removable storage device.

[RudeViper]

Something is wrong with the command you said to use....

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 $ none /media/ramdisk tmpfs nodev,nosuid,size=2.5Gi,mode=1777 0 0
No command 'none' found, did you mean:
 Command 'nona' from package 'hugin-tools' (universe)
 Command 'one' from package 'opennebula' (universe)
 Command 'note' from package 'note' (universe)
 Command 'cone' from package 'cone' (universe)
 Command 'node' from package 'node' (universe)
 Command 'node' from package 'nodejs-legacy' (universe)
none: command not found


[xenopeek]

That wasn't a command I shared, that was the line of text you were to add to the file /etc/fstab.