On Wed, Aug 09, 2006, Bob Copeland wrote:
> > The problem is then that mounting/unmounting binding/unbinding the
> > device all need root privileges.
> 
> Just to take a side-step here, what if we changed our udev setups to
> make the device read/writeable by a specific group, and edited fstab/
> gnome-volume-manager config/whatever to allow user mounts.  Does that
> solve the permissions problems?  Then the particular code in lk could 
> just return -EPERM for those operations if they don't work.  

This is what I meant when I said that the eject patch would fix the
issue of mounting/unmounting. However, it is still an operation which
requires root privileges, so the systems mount command will have to
be issued from a fork/exec.

Since we are directly accessing hardware, there is no getting around the
fact that root operations will be required at some point.
My solution to this is to launch a separate root-owned process for
performing these operations. The main issue with this is that you need
to have "mount" and "eject" (or "karma_helper") in your PATH or specify
their location specifically.
EV wants to put the functionality into a daemon, which still has the
problem of locating the socket file although that is less of an issue
since we are in control of where it gets created.
A third option is to make riocp, etc. into suid root processes which
launch a sub-thread for the root-only operations and then drop their
privileges. This solves all the path problems but makes me slightly
ill just thinking about it.

EV thinks that fork/exec is ugly and I think that yet-another-system-daemon
is ugly.

I don't think that we're going to find any nice solution to this
problem. We just need to reach a consensus on which option is the
least ugly!

Keith.

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