Re: nonroot umount

[Peter Staubach <staubach@redhat.com>]

Jeff Moyer wrote:

>==> Regarding Re: [autofs] nonroot umount; Peter Staubach <staubach@redhat.com> adds:
>
>staubach> 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 )
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>
>staubach> It seems to me that a better architected solution might be to tie in
>staubach> the automounter with the eject(1) sort of command.
>
>staubach> It is not good for a user to have to know that he needs to zing the
>staubach> automounter in order to remove his media.
>
>What "desktop" system are we talking about?  If you're using hal/udev, then
>they have a much nicer mechanism for handling such things.  Autofs isn't
>really a good fit for removable media, in my experience.
>

Cool!

My only objection was building tools to utilize automount specific
implementation details.  That's just wrong.

Perhaps we need to redirect Marcos Diez to better functionality to
solve his problems...  :-)

    Thanx...

       ps