What is the udev rule to allow specific thumb drive vendors?

Question

How can I write a udev rule that whitelists specific vendors and doesn't allow other USB drives? Do I put it in /etc/udev/rules.d, or /lib/udev/rules.d? What command do I run to test if the rule is working?

Answer 1

You use the udevadm utility to retrieve the relevant information for your device, filtering for the vendor details should narrow down your return, eg.,

udevadm info -a -n /dev/sdc | grep vendor

You can then use the information to build a udev rule to perform, or restrict, actions dependant upon the type of device that is mounted.

The Arch Wiki has a good entry on writing udev rules and there is a much fuller description (although some of it is outdated) on the Writing udev rules page maintained by Daniel Drake.

The rule is placed in /etc/udev/rules.d/ and is named according to this convention: number-name.rules where the number indicates precedence and the name is for identifiability. See man udev:

Rules files
The udev rules are read from the files located in the system rules directory /usr/lib/udev/rules.d, the volatile runtime directory /run/udev/rules.d and the local administration directory /etc/udev/rules.d. All rules files are collectively sorted and processed in lexical order, regardless of the directories in which they live. However, files with identical file names replace each other.

Files in /etc have the highest priority, files in /run take precedence over files with the same name in /lib. This can be used to override a system-supplied rules file with a local file if needed; a symlink in /etc with the same name as a rules file in /lib, pointing to /dev/null, disables the rules file entirely.

Rule files must have the extension .rules; other extensions are ignored.

Ensure that your rule to mount the vendor-specific drives has precedence over the accompanying rule to disallow mounting with OPTIONS+="ignore_device".