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

[Brendan Kidwell]

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 at 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 at 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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