Hello fine people,
I again seem to have caused much bother over what should be a trivial
matter.
In retrospect the question should have been...
"How does one manage the floppy, CD and I guess other
removable media on a DEC workstation?"
Well I have had a lot of good advice for which I am most grateful, but
sadly nobody has come up with a really good answer (My opinion, they
probably think that it is a good answer - and I mean that in the nicest
possible way)
Petri Kallberg gets full marks, He has clearly confronted this problem
previously and made the reasonably sensible decision that...
Whoever owns the screen owns the removable media devices.
Having made that decision he has arranged for the X startup scripts
which run as root to change the ownership of the removable media
devices to match the sceen owner. This means that mtools will work
and provide privacy but leaves the problem of still requiring to mount
the CD. So being smart he has writen a mount program that will mount
only the CD and this can be installed with the suid sticky. Petri
hopes that this does not open any security holes. I hope that
in paraphrasing Petri I have done him justice and apologise now
for any errors of representation.
I have Petri's program if anyone wants to know more, get the code,
whatever, you know where I am.
I am still not entirely sure about this system as I like to
leave the documentation CD's in some machines. This works fine as long
as the mount is in use the eject button does not function. So I will
probably just borrow his idea for allocation of the floppy ownership.
The bottom line however is that it's time for me to say Wakey Wakey
to our friends at DEC once more. (Some of you peeps are of the opinion
that the DEC bods ignore my rantings but rest assured that there are
some who take note and act accordingly.) Having given us the utterly
dreadful CDE with a pop up for every trivial function they have at least
given us the dxkerneltuner and diskconfig which is some compensation
but...
How about giving us some software to support removable media
with a nice little GUI and everything?
I would recommend looking at the sun vold system, see how it works
with their FileManager (yes I hate GUI file systems but that is just me
being a crank). Then have a look at Linux, see how it can mount just
about any conceivable file system and look at sudo which provides
just the ticket for enabling user access to rootine operations.
Thanks again to all
k.mcmanus_at_gre.ac.uk -
http://www.gre.ac.uk/~k.mcmanus
-------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Kevin McManus ||
School of Computing & Math Science ||
The University of Greenwich ||
Wellington St. Woolwich ||Tel +44 (0)181 331 8719
London SE18 6PF UK ||Fax +44 (0)181 331 8665
Received on Thu Jul 31 1997 - 12:58:23 NZST