[ale] Permission hell question

[Geoffrey]

Dow Hurst wrote:
> I'm glad your setting the record straight on this but I think it may be 
> distribution specific or device type specific.  I have had on my RH9 box 
> the user option in /etc/fstab and also the device to have write 
> permissions for all but could not write to a CF card thru a card reader 
> once mounted.  Once I did it as root then the write worked.  It may be 
> that RH9 on this box has another security setting preventing it and/or 
> the USB card reader might not be interpreted the same way as a zip since 
> different code is mounting it.

I would certainly hope this is not the case.  I didn't note what type of 
  zip drive it is (ide, scsi, usb, parallel..), but I would be terribly 
disappointed if the permissions were handled differently from one device 
to another.  I can see it for different file system types, depending on 
what they support.  Maybe Sean can post the specifics of the actual zip 
interface?

> Anyway, my thought is that the safest way 
> to guarantee the method to work is to just su to root to mount and copy 
> the files, especially for new users.  I may be quoting also too much 
> IRIX specific NFS mount rules.  The underlying mount point permissions 
> should play into what a mounted filesystem is capable of, so if not, 
> then Linux is different than IRIX there.  Sorry for the wrong info!

It could be a difference between nfs and vfat mounts though.

> I 
> get different scenarios for success between RH and SuSE and IRIX for all 
> this stuff.  The only way I can guarantee that a mount and write will 
> work will be to do it all as root.  I don't like it and it is probably 
> more a mixture of security settings, permissions, and the /etc/fstab 
> options than anything else between distros that botches things up.  In 
> SuSE on login you can get permissions on devices changed on the fly to 
> the UID logging in.  On RH that doesn't seem to happen.  IRIX had it's 
> own daemon, mediad, to manage removeable media.

Can't say anything about IRIX, but both my Red Hat WS and my SuSE deal 
with memory sticks the same way.  Memory sticks are processed through 
the scsi emulation and so is are the parallel and scsi zip drives. 
Can't speak of other hardware implementations of zips though.

-- 
Until later, Geoffrey                     Registered Linux User #108567
Building secure systems in spite of Microsoft