Sharing devices "out of the box"

[Rahul Sundaram]

Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
> On Wednesday, 27 December 2006 at 20:14, Paul Michael Reilly wrote:
>> I've made my FC6 laptop available to family members (including grandma) 
>> as a shared machine.  I've taught them to log into their own session 
>> using "switch user" so that they are on their own vt session.  Works 
>> nice until they want to share devices, like audio and the CD burner. 
>> For FC6 I have to take pains to set up permissions appropriately but it 
>> does occur to me to ask how Rawhide should deal with this.  There seem 
>> to be two schools of thought:
>>
>> 1) Sharing devices automagically is a no-brainer; it must be turned on 
>> by default.
>>
>> 2) Sharing devices is a security weakness and no self respecting distro 
>> would enable such a thing by default.
>>
>> It's all well and good when the PC is set up by a someone reading any of 
>> the Redhat lists but should there come a day when Dell (or some such) 
>> ships RHEL this issue and lots more like it will be on the table.
>>
>> It does occur to me that maybe the current user (the one who currently 
>> owns X, the "selected" user for lack of a better description) should 
>> dynamically own devices but this is not very satisfying: perhaps the 
>> various users set their own special IM sounds in which case the distro 
>> is setting policy rather than mechanism.  So the issue does get 
>> complicated quickly.  Left to my own devices, I'd share the devices by 
>> default and build in the ability to graphically configure device sharing 
>> which smacks of a desktop (Gnome/KDE/Xfce/?) solution which might just 
>> already exist and I haven't come across such a beast.
> 
> You could put a question in anaconda (or firstboot) if you want to share
> devices with console users by default and configure accordingly (g+rw for
> devices and add local users to some special group?)

These sort of questions shouldnt be pushed to the user. Choose a good 
default and make it easily configurable without relying on Anaconda. 
Also see http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Desktop/FastUserSwitching which 
talks about device permissions.

Rahul