/etc/fstab Lacks Mount Point For Floppy

[Michal Jaegermann]

On Sun, Oct 17, 2004 at 06:02:35PM -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-10-16 at 16:16 -0600, Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> > I would
> > rather like to know how to replace this "exec" by "noexec,nodev" -
> > for example - but maybe one day this black magic will be also
> > revealed. :-) 
> 
> You can just put a file called my-storage-policy.fdi or something else
> ending in .fdi into /usr/share/hal/fdi/95userpolicy with this content
.....
[ Bunch of XML snipped ]
.....
Yes, that what I thought more or less but I did not have a time to
go carefuly enough through all that XML.  This is quite "noisy" and
it is easy to miss something.

Interestingly enough at least a USB floppy (a regular floppy seem to
need some tuning at the moment) actually mounts 'noexec,nodev,nosuid',
like it should, even if a corresponding /etc/fstab entry says
"exec".  Still in a position of a system administarator I would
rather have /etc/fstab spell out such options instead on relying
that some program doing real mounts, which may be replaced by a
broken version one day, "knows better" and will do the actual mount
in a more restrictive manner.

Besides in years of experience I found over and over again that
things which "know better" what do you want, does not matter if
beneficial or not in the given moment, will _invariably_ turn out to
be a major PITA one day in manners which you cannot predict right
now.  I do not mean good defaults here but a magic behind scenes
which changes things on its own in an opaque way.  We always lack an
imagination; and those who think that they don't are doubly wrong.

Therefore in my opinion although results of a floppy mount turn out
to be, in general, right that this is done in a totally wrong place
and, yes, this matters.

  Michal