[Techtalk] Auto-mounting (WAS [Grrltalk] Misinformation in the IT workplace)

[Meredydd]

On Thursday 26 February 2004 10:35, showercurtain wrote:
> I thought that floppy drives aren't auto-mounted by default because
> of security reasons and file permission-type stuff.
I don't really see how this could be a problem. The standard solution to 
this is to force the disk to be mounted -o noexec (stop anyone 
executing files on that filesystem), which prevents people from doing 
things like inserting a floppy with a suid binary and gaining root 
access that way.

> Now I use RedHat 
> 8 and I'm wondering why that doesn't apply to the cdrom, ie: if I want 
> to open a file on a floppy disk I have to mount the floppy, but I
> don't need to do that with the cd-rom.
Well, if the reason floppies aren't automounted is what I proposed 
above, I'd guess that the cd-rom is forced to use the iso9660 
filesystem, which does not (I don't think - feel free to prove me 
wrong) support such a concept as suid executables. Floppies, by 
contrast, often use filesystems such as ext2 which very much do.

Another thought has just occurred to me, by the way - how are you trying 
to access said devices? If you're using your graphical environment (I 
know KDE does this, I assume Gnome does), when you click on a "device" 
icon, the desktop environment explicitly tries to mount the volume for 
you. If this is the case, then you might want to look into whether 
users are allowed by /etc/fstab to mount floppies explicitly on your 
sytem.

Meredydd