RFE: More on mounting + a question about the "console" flag

Kyrre Ness Sjobak kyrre at solution-forge.net
Mon Oct 4 13:35:41 UTC 2004


While there are so much chattering about automounting, security
considerations of the new fstab "console" tag etc., i have as a systems
administrator withnessed one thing - with something as old as floppyes.

People mount up the floppy (acctually, they have no clue that they are
mounting it, they just click the nice little "floppy" icon), get their
files, pull out the floppy (without umounting), and logs out.

Then, 2 minutes later, another user logs in, pulls up his/her floppy,
and... the floppy is mounted. Cant get it umounted, and can't mount
his/her floppy. Grr...

Reason that there is a problem with floppyes and not other removable
storage, is of cource that floppyes is the only removable storage that
the user can pull out without the system gets the message - if you pull
an usb mass storage plug, it gets umounted (and it is mounted "sync" so
you probably won't loose data either). If you try to eject a cd, it wont
come out - untill you umount it (this is really frustrating to new users
as well - the "eject" button should umount the cd and eject it, and if
it is buisy, tell dbus to tell gnome to display that popup we all loved
in fc1)

But what if all volumes that the user mounted when he/she was logged on,
automatically got umounted when the user who mounted it logs out? That
would solve it.

About the "console" flag: would a user sitting on an XDMCP terminal be
considered a console user or not? How is it determined if he/she is a
console user or not? Because someone sitting on an xdmcp terminal
shouldn't be considered "console"...

Kyrre




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