On Fri, 2004-09-10 at 05:40 -0700, Steve G wrote:
>I'm not sure what the default policy should be though - most
people are
>happy about not having to go to the commandline to get access to their
>partitions and some people have more or less valid security concerns.
OK, I've had some time to think this over. Traditionally, the default is on the
open - all inclusive side of things unless there is the possibility of damage.
e.g., tcp_wrapper defaults to open, iptable defaults to open. You must intervene
to secure the system.
As long as the drives are only detected and mount points made, it don't have a
problem. If the drives are *mounted*, I have a real problem. By mounting the
drive, you may suddenly cause a drive to get fsck'ed by a newer program that
oopses older kernels, or relabeled by SE Linux which will oops older kernels.
No mounting!
Even thought I have hand edited my fstab and hal made mount points, it appears
not to have mounted the drives.
Sure, hal doesn't mount drives.
However, when you log in to GNOME then gnome-volume-manager, in the
default configuration, mounts all the drives as the user who is logging
in. And unmounts them at logout. I think this is sane given the options
put in /etc/fstab. An example from my fstab
/dev/sda1 /media/compact_flash vfat
noauto,user,exec,kudzu,noatime,sync 0 0
and it's mounted as
/dev/sda1 /media/compact_flash vfat
rw,sync,noatime,nodiratime,nosuid,nodev,uid=500,gid=500,fmask=0022,dmask=0022 0 0
Note the nosuid,nodev options thanks to having user in the fstab line.
So, I hope we can agree this is pretty safe?
Based on a suggestion from Jeff yesterday, I went and tuned my
/etc/hal/hald.conf
file for false, false, false.
That is bad advice; I'm not sure how well turning off media detection
works presently (I test it once in a while though) and I think g-v-m
ignores the automount hint. When Nautilus and GNOME VFS is ready, this
will be supported as well [1].
[1] : GNOME VFS presently relies on the fstab, but there is no fstab
entry if there is no media in card and there wont be if media detection
is disabled :-)
On next boot, the mount points disappeared. Then I
re-installed hal. My config file was renamed hald.cond.rpmorig. :( There needs
to be a %config(noreplace) for hald.conf in the spec file.
Sounds like a bug that is easy to fix. I'll do that, thanks for pointing
it out.
Also, on first boot, hal ignores my wishes and puts the mount points
there. I
haven't tried a reboot yet to see if on second boot they go away. Not sure yet if
this is a regression from yesterdays updates or just a first boot behavior.
Disabling media detection in /etc/hal/hald.conf only means we won't poll
for media if we otherwise would do that. So of course hal initially
detects your devices and create mount points.
Next question, is there supposed to be a /media/cdrom mount point? or
is it still
/dev/cdrom? Or both?
There is supposed to be a /media/cdrom mount point if you got a CD-ROM
only drive; if it's a DVD-ROM it will be /media/dvdrom, if it's a CD-
RW/DVD-RW it will be /media/cdrw_dvdrw and so on. It will probably
reference the non-symlinked device e.g. /dev/hdc, /dev/hdd, /dev/sr0 or
whatever.
With the latest udev, however, there will be compatibility
symlinks /dev/cdrom, /dev/cdrom1, ... that points to the real device
file e.g. /dev/hdc. hal doesn't really care about these symlinks.
David