I had a store credit to use up before Christmas, and so I bought a couple of USB key storage devices, one for the lady and one for me. I was quite please at how easy the were to set up, just adding a line to /etc/fstab and mounting the device. For the longest time though, I could only perform operations on it as root, which is tiresome. Luckily, Emma pointed me at some good documentation and so I was able to get everything working sweetly. Here’s what I’ve got working:

# A directory called /mnt/key
# These lines in /etc/fstab
none        /proc/bus/usb usbfs defaults            0   0
/dev/sda    /mnt/key    vfat    rw,user,noauto      0   0
# And these lines in my .bashrc
alias key="mount /dev/sda;ls /mnt/key"
alias unkey="umount /mnt/key"

It works pretty sweetly, and these storage devices are awesome. I’ve never gotten close to filling it up yet.