On Sunday 21 August 2005 20:56, Carl Hartung wrote:
On a side note: Having never mounted to a populated directory before, I just confirmed that it does, in fact, hide the contents of the mounted-to directory.
What are the security implications of this?
None. root is the only user that can mount a partition. He may delegate this power, but only on a per-mountpoint/partition basis. And since root can destroy a system in a multitude of ways, there is nothing 'extra' dangerous here. When you're using root you need to be careful
Obviously, one discourages this practice, but are there any technical dangers, such as confused disk consumption monitoring processes, or the risk of file system corruption?... anything along that vein?
No, not at all. A user may be confused when he writes to a directory thinking it's mounted when it isn't, or vice versa, but disk consumption will look at the real partitions, not at the mount points. And this is an integral feature of the virtual file system in linux, so there will not be corruption simply by using this feature (although there may of course be bugs, but I would say the likelyhood was pretty low for such a central feature)