Subject: Re: Card Reader Problem Update
From: James Zuelow (e5z8652@zuelow.net)
Date: Sun Jun 22 2003 - 08:53:32 AKDT
On Sat, 21 Jun 2003 21:36:24 -0800
"Lee Ross" <leeross@gci.net> wrote:
>
> mount: only root can mount /dev/sda1 on /mnt/card......this one was finally
> resolved by changing the line in /etc/fstab to the following;
> /dev/sda1 /mnt/card vfat user,noauto,owner,nosuid 0 0
>
> I would be interested to know how to read the last part of that line,
> starting with 'user'.
>
OK, these are all in the manpage for mount, so you could try `man fstab` to see what the format of the file is supposed to be, and `man mount` to see a detailed listing of options and get a more comprehensive listing. However a quick rundown:
user - lets an ordinary user mount the device, however it implies noexec. This can cause problems if you expect ordinary users to both mount a CD and then execute programs on it. (This issue came up with the Juneau-LUG OpenOffice.org installation CD.)
noauto - if you type `mount -a` on the command line, the system will attempt to mount all of the filesystems in fstab. The noauto option is useful for removable media so that you don't get 'no medium found' errors when you boot or `mount -a` is called.
owner - this is similar to user, except that the mounting user must be the owner of the device. I don't think it hurts to have both in the same fstab listing, but I don't think it makes sense either.
nosuid - this is a security setting. Mount will not respect the setuid flag on files. So if you mount a CD you burnt from www.hakerz.r.us (hope that doesn't exist) and it has a setuid root install script, it will run as the user who mounted the CD. Hopefully that user isn't root... Also, this is implied by the user flag so doesn't really need to be there.
Cheers,
James
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2a23 : Sun Jun 22 2003 - 08:53:43 AKDT