Non-privileged mount/unmount UI
NPMount is a command-line tool to provide limited mount and unmount capabilities to non-privileged users, such as mounting and unmounting external media including optical discs and thumb drives.
NPMount can be used directly from the command-line or as a platform-independent backend for GUI applications such as file managers.
It is more convenient than other methods because it is fully portable, and never requires the user to enter a password.
NPMount is safer than sudo, since it never allows the execution of arbitrary code under escalated privileges. Only mount and umount commands for authorized mount points are ever run as root.
The configuration file is simple. It indicates which mount points can be controlled by members of a given group. The default configuration shown below indicates that members of the operator group can mount and unmount all directories under /media, which commonly contains mount points for USB sticks and optical discs.
# Group Mount-points
operator /media/*
Mounting also requires that the mount point be listed in /etc/fstab or equivalent. The Unix mount command is issued with a mount point alone. Most mounts of external media are performed by an automount service, anyway, so use of npmount to mount media should not often be necessary.
Unmounting does not require a listing in /etc/fstab, since the Unix umount command needs only a mount point or device.
Using the configuration above as an example, members of the operator group can run the following without authenticating:
npmount umount /media/cd0
If /media/cd0 is configured in /etc/fstab or equivalent, then members of the operator group can also run
npmount mount /media/cd0