best practices for an external hard drive that many hosts might use?

["Brendan Kidwell-2" <user=1552@nabble.blu.org>]

 I have a couple of external hard drives with Firewire and USB connectors on 
each, and in the last year I've been ridding myself of Windows and OS X 
computers, to the point where it doesn't make any sense to use NTFS or FAT32 
on these disks. 

I'd like to reformat them with a filesystem native to Linux such as ext3 or 
reiserfs, but I have a concern about permissions, because Linux drivers for 
NTFS and FAT32 don't support file-level permissions and any other filesystem 
I would use would support them. I don't want to get caught in a mess when I 
drop a bunch of files at home onto the disk and have them owned by 
brendan@home (could be user number 1001) and then I can't read them when I 
plug the disk in at work when I'm logged in at kidwellb@office (could be 
user number 1002). 

Ideally I would like it to behave the same as any FAT32-formatted USB 
storage device is typically mounted: You plug it in and your desktop 
automatically mounts it under a folder like "/media", and any user who can 
access such mounts has FULL access on ALL files in the external device. In 
other words, I want to dispense with file-level permissions. 

Is there a proper way to do this, either while formatting the disk, or in 
the command used to mount it? 

Brendan Kidwell 

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