Friday, September 3, 2010

Allowing users to mount drives(Linux)

By default, Linux will not allow users to mount drives. Only root can do it, and making the mount binary suid
root is not a good idea. With a special command in the /etc/fstab file, you can change that.
This is a typical line for the fd0 (A:) drive in /etc/fstab:
/dev/fd0 /mnt auto noauto,user 1 1
The keywords here are noauto and user. Noauto tells mount not the try to mount a diskette on boot, and user
allows any user to mount the drive into /mnt. The auto keyword is also interesting. It tells mount to try to find
out which file system is on the diskette. You could also use msdos or ext2.

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