Why root?

[Clinton MacDonald]

Mr. Parks:

This won't completely answer your question, but it might point you in 
the correct direction. Sorry!

On Wednesday, October 15, 2003, at 03:54  PM, Ted Parks wrote:
> 1) I have created /mnt/floppy in /mnt. But when I use vim to add a 
> line with /dev/fd0 and /mnt/floppy to /etc/fstab, YDL does not 
> remember the line when I boot up again, even after I have saved it. 
> How do I make the change to /etc/fstab stick and be recognized?

I don't know how to do this with floppy disks, since my Mac doesn't 
have a floppy drive!. However, this is the protocol I use to mount a 
non-floppy partition (a Mac HFS partition, in this case); perhaps it 
will give you a hint:

[1] in a console, get superuser privileges ("su")
[2] using vi, pico or vim, edit the file /etc/fstab
[3] add the line --

/dev/hda10    /mnt/macos    hfs    noauto,user,rw    0 0

[4] from the console, as a regular user, type "mount /mnt/macos"
[5] Voila!

The "noauto" prevents the partition from mounting at startup; the 
"user" allows the user mounting access (why this isn't the default is 
beyond me), the "rw" lets you have read and write access (as I am 
corrected by Bill Longman, one of our Yellow Dog Newbie Gurus). Play 
with a variation of this (maybe search on the YDL Web site), and you 
might be able to get your floppy to mount from an ordinary user.

> 2) In YDL, why do have to be root to issue the mount command? This is 
> different from RedHat. What do I change to be able to mount a floppy 
> from the command line without being root?

I don't think this is peculiar to Yellow Dog Linux, but is a "feature" 
of Linux in general. Why is it this way? I don't know, but I attribute 
it to the overall paranoia that is built into Linux from the ground up. 
The attitude is, "You can change it to a more sensible default, but you 
had better know what you are doing, and *we* [i.e., the Linux authors] 
refuse to make it easy for you. Otherwise, you might accidently do 
something stupid." Of course, in taking that attitude, they make it 
necessary for a *normal* user to do many daily tasks while logged in as 
root, thus erasing the potential security features. :-/

> 3) In general, any help for configuring the beige G3 so I can use disk 
> manager to mount the floppy?

Probably by getting your fstab set up to allow a normal user to mount 
floppies.

Good luck!

Best wishes,
Clint

-- 
Dr. Clinton C. MacDonald | <mailto:clint DOT macdonald AT sbcglobal DOT 
net>