First boot with 20040908 changes

David Zeuthen david at fubar.dk
Fri Sep 10 14:51:58 UTC 2004


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





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