/dev/...

[Johnson David]

On Monday 14 April 2003 10:00 pm, Vladik Kozin wrote:

> Hi! What if I'd like ordinary users to be able to mount /dev/fd0, for
> instance, onto a common dir located in /mnt (/mnt/floppy)?
> I made mkdir -m 755 /mnt/floppy as root. When I try to mount fd0 onto
> this dir as an ordinary user I get "msdos: /dev/fd0: Operation not
> permitted" while when doing the same onto a dir that this user owns
> everything goes fine.

I won't give a technical answer, since this isn't -questions, but I'll 
say a few words about it.

First of all, the user needs to be the owner of the mount point. Having 
rwx permissions or a group member is not enough. This is why you need 
to have a mount point in your home directory.

Now for the big question. Why? Because a multi-user system cannot let a 
user arbitrarily mount and unmount the resources that may be used by 
other users. Imagine if the user wants to take their floppy and go home 
for the day, but someone else is still writing a file to it. A floppy 
you can at least eject and worry about recovering the corrupted data 
later. But a CDROM you won't even be able to eject, let along unmount.

David