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q: how to make /mnt/resource readable/writable but other users in azure linux vm? right now /mnt/resource is owned by root and only root can read/write. how can i make this readable/writable by other users on the system?
and this should be persistent (i.e. after system restart it should still work)

a: 
how to make /mnt/resource readable/writable but other users in azure linux vm?

to do this you need to use a command similar to the following:
chown other_user /mnt/resource


and this should be persistent (i.e. after system restart it should still work)

based on this documentation, the azure linux agent (/usr/sbin/waagent) does the following:

• manages the resource disk
• formats and mounts the resource disk

upon provisioning an instance (starting/restarting) the device /dev/sdb1 will be mounted by waagent upon boot based on the setting resourcedisk.mountpoint= in /etc/waagent.conf, defaulting to /mnt/resource. you can verify this by typing the command cat /var/log/waagent.log | grep sdb1 after stopping and starting an instance should show something like this:
2016/06/17 09:06:42 resource disk (/dev/sdb1) is mounted at /mnt/resource with fstype ext4 

because waagent creates the mount some time after the boot, setting permissions immediately upon boot will not work. (i've experienced a race condition where i created a directory in /mnt/resource only to have it deleted when the mount occurs.)
you can create a service which will wait until /dev/sdb1 is mounted to /mnt/resource/ then change permissions as needed.
one way would be to have a script similar to the following run as an init script:
#!/bin/sh

log=/tmp/startup.log
while [ `mount | grep /mnt/resource | wc -l` -lt 1 ];
do
    echo "waiting for mount to be created by waagent..." >> ${log}
    sleep 5
done
echo "changing /mnt/resource permissions..." >> ${log}
chown other_user /mnt/resource


a: chown and chmod are the commands to achieve this.
probably easier just to read this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/chmod 

a: /mnt/resource will not persist no matter what you do with it documentation

user
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