rw permissions for world on /dev/st0 - good advice?

[Alexander Holst]

Hi,

I am planning on doing some periodic backup stuff on tape as a user
other than root and therefore would like to give everybody rw
permissions on /dev/st0 - in order to be able to write backups on tape
as that user (and eventually other users as well).

Standard permissions on /dev/st0 are:
crw-rw----    1 root     disk       9,   0 Jan 31  2003 /dev/st0

I would like that to read:
crw-rw-rw-    1 root     disk       9,   0 Jan 31  2003 /dev/st0


Is this safe to do or are there any security concerns in doing so?


In some cases, I would like to use the tape drive over the network and
therefore would like to be able to write to tape as a user other than
root as well ;), using something like "tar -cjf user@host:/dev/st0
--rsh-command=/usr/bin/ssh DirToBackup"

Would that be a safe way of utilizing the tapedrive of another machine?


Note: the amount of date to be backed up will never be a lot, it's
merely config files and customization stuff.


Greetings,
Alex

-- 
Alexander Holst
Hergulesse Design
ph: +49 [0]711 887 5195
fx: +49 [0]711 887 5196
<alex.holst@hergulesse.de>
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