When you mount your vfat partion you can pass a uid and gid option to set the userid and groupid the filesystem will be owned by. You can also set a file and directory permission mask. If the filesystem will be used by several people consider creating a group and adding yourself as a member.
Your fstab should look something like this.
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/v1 vfat noauto,user,uid=blah,gid=blah 0 2
and your mount command would look like this.
mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /mnt/v1 -o uid=blah,gid=blah
You may also want to look at installing the pmount package to make mounting filesystem as a user easy.
Answer to questions in the comments.
1) is the fstab necessary also when I
use the mount command?
If you want a user to be able to mount the command without using sudo, then yes.
2) do I have to be root for the mount
command you gave me?
You could remove the noauto from the fstab, and the filesystem will be mounted at boot time. Or as a regular user they can mount with a command like mount /mnt/v1.
3) How do the changes in fstab become
active?
Since you have used noauto, nothing will happen automatically. The entry just allows a user to be able to mount the fileystem.
In summary from the discussion in the comments:
Your problem was essentially that you used symlinks in your mount point paths and at boot the system was not able to follow those properly to recognise the result as "nested mounts". Therefor systemd did not mount your file-systems in a proper sequential order to handle that dependancy.
You have a mount point /apps_home
You have a symlink /apps --> /apps_home/apps
And you have also try to mount volumes on /apps/var/progress
/apps/var/custom and /apps/var/custom
The problem is that the mount points /apps/var/[custom|progress|standard] don't exist until /apps_home is mounted.
Solution:
Leave the symlink but mount your file-systems on the actual directory paths of the symlink target: i.e. convert your fstab entries to:
UUID=5717b613-a9f4-43c9-95d2-cfbbb891bd19 /apps_home ext4 defaults 1 2
UUID=e24df090-2dda-404c-8944-a28bd37d6c5e /apps_home/apps/var/progress ext4 defaults 1 2
UUID=5f254c77-a91d-4255-8315-9325ddb7a9d8 /apps_home/apps/var/standard ext4 defaults 1 2
UUID=746c70c1-002a-4249-a06f-df393a99252c /apps_home/apps/var/custom ext4 defaults 1 2
systemd-fstab-generato will generate the needed mount unit files and systemd.mount will implicitly add the correct dependancies:
If a mount unit is beneath another mount unit in the file system hierarchy, both a requirement dependency and an ordering dependency between both units are created automatically.
Alternative: remove the entries from /etc/fstab and create your own mount unit files and manually configure the requirement and ordering dependancies to ensure that /apps/var/progress
/apps/var/custom and /apps/var/custom don't get mounted before /apps_home.
Best Answer
Try this:
And after that try mounting again.