How to mount NTFS in Linux without root password

Question

I want to mount/umount a 3rd hard disk (with a NTFS filesystem) under Linux (OpenSuse (Leap15.2)) only as needed and as a normal user. But without entering my root password every time. So far I have tried it with entries in the fstab and in sudoers, but each time I must type the root password. Below are the entries in fstab and sudoers:

in sudoers:

root    ALL = (ALL) ALL
ALL     ALL = (ALL) ALL
#
%users  ALL = (root) NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/mount
%users  ALL = (root) NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/umount

in fstab:

LABEL=DATA3 /home/leap153/data3  ntfs-3g noauto,uid=1000,gid=100,dmask=002,fmask=002,noatime  0 0

FUSE is installed and uid and gid have the correct number of the user (checked).

Answer 1

Don't do it by configuring sudo to allow mount, this is highly insecure. See https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/258637/why-do-i-need-the-root-password-when-mounting-an-internal-drive-in-linux for details.

Instead, try adding the user option in fstab and then use mount without sudo. Note that this only works with kernel 5.15 and later and the new ntfs3 driver:

 LABEL=DATA3 /home/leap153/data3  ntfs3 noauto,user,uid=1000,gid=100,dmask=002,fmask=002,noatime  0 0

Then

 mount /home/leap153/data3

Another alternative is to use autofs or possibly udisks.

Unfortuantely, udisks doesn't work with volume labels, so you will need to determine the real block device for the partition. You can use the blkid -L data3 command to find it. For example

udisksctl mount -b /dev/sdb1

which likely will mount your partition (it will tell you where) as /media/user/DATA3 (where user is your username). Note that this will only work without sudo for the user logged into the console.

The third alternative using autofs is more automatic but also more complicated to set up, but will work for all users, both local and remote.