How to mount external vfat drive as user?
Solution 1:
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.