[techtalk] Mounting CD's and Floppies/Using Control Panel

[T. E. Pickering]

under RH 6.1, the permissions on floppies and cdroms and such are
switched over to be owned by whoever is logged on to the console.
when noone's on console, they switch back to root.  also, the option
"owner" is specified in /etc/fstab as in:

/dev/cdrom              /cdrom                  iso9660 noauto,owner,ro 0 0

so that only the owner of the device can mount it rather than any
user.  this is a far better, more secure, and more general solution
than suid'ing mount, using the "user" option, making devices world
writable/readable, etc.

for more info, check out michael k. johnson's white paper on this at
http://www.redhat.com/support/wpapers/newpam/index.html.  this stuff
is a general feature of the latest versions of PAM so it might also
apply to other dists, but i've not tried them myself.

tim

-- 
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Tim Pickering                 |     Kapteyn Institute, Postbus 800  |  
|  tim at astro.rug.nl              | 9700 AV Groningen, The Netherlands  |
|  http://www.astro.rug.nl/~tim/ |                    +31-50-363-6519  |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
It is often the case that the man who can't tell a lie thinks he is the best
judge of one.
		-- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"

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