On Tue, January 13, 2009 01:36, Randall R Schulz wrote:
Hi,
I have a situation where I want the opposite of Josef Wolf (openSUSE list thread with Subject: "How to mount external drives automatically?" starting on Jan. 9, 2009).
I'm running openSUSE 11.1 (the inability of 10.0 to properly access the FireWire bus on my system was the straw that broke the upgrade camel's back).
So what are the relevant subsystems, commands and configuration files I need to learn about to get manual mounting for select external drives and partitions?
Hello Randall, According to a FreeBSD user I know, the automagic mounting of external drives should be considered a serious security bug. He reasons like this: Suppose you are on the road, and you have your usb stick with some precious documents. You urgently want to print something, so you'll want to plug in the stick somewhere, mount it r/o, pipe the file to lpr and be done with it. However, on every "user friendly" distribution there are all kinds of windows that pop up when you plug in the usb stick, but none of them is a shell prompt. Worst of all, you notice that your stick is already mounted read/write! This is on an unknown system that you know nothing about. It might as well wipe your stick, or install a rootkit on it. How are you ever going to know what the userfriendly police is doing behind your back? This little story really happened last year on FOSDEM. I cleaned up the story a bit, because in reality there were a few strong words being used, and some people's feelings were hurt. Those who know the FOSDEM organisation will be able to locate the blog with the original story. -- Amedee -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org