Re: nonroot umount

[Peter Staubach <staubach@redhat.com>]

Marcos Diez wrote:

>In a Unix desktop system automount is very practical for CDROMs, digital
>cameras, USB flash drives and any other type of removable media.
>But it is annoying to the unprivileged user to wait the timeout to
>remove the media.
>
>Since it is insecure to allow the user to do a "killall -s SIGUSR1
>automount", I wrote a program that does exactly (and only) that. Of
>course it must be suid root, but it makes life much easier. I double
>verified that there are no buffer overflows and I believe it's safe. The
>program is not interactive, so a malicious user can't do much with it
>anyway.
>
>It gets the PIDs from instances of automount by parsing /proc/mounts
>It would be nice if it could be added to the autofs distribution.
>
>
>http://boby.unitron.com.br/%7Emarcos/umounter.c
>
>
>To compile:
>
>gcc -O3 -ansi -Wall -pedantic umounter.c -o umounter
>
>To install:
>cp umounter /usr/local/bin && chmod 4711 /usr/local/bin/umounter
>
>To use:
>
>./umounter
>or
>./umounter --verbose
>(show the signaled PIDs )
>

It seems to me that a better architected solution might be to tie in
the automounter with the eject(1) sort of command.

It is not good for a user to have to know that he needs to zing the
automounter in order to remove his media.

    Thanx...

       ps