*BSD News Article 97838


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From: deraadt@theos.com (Theo de Raadt)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: User mount possible?
Date: 15 Jun 1997 10:06:07 GMT
Organization: OpenBSD
Lines: 28
Message-ID: <DERAADT.97Jun15040607@zeus.pacifier.com>
References: <5nr27n$ees@vestein.arb-phys.uni-dortmund.de> <5nu2di$7o@xciv.demon.co.uk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: zeus.theos.com
In-reply-to: paul@xciv.org's message of 14 Jun 1997 12:22:10 GMT
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.misc:3572 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:43002

In article <5nu2di$7o@xciv.demon.co.uk> paul@xciv.org (Paul Civati) writes:
   In article <5nr27n$ees@vestein.arb-phys.uni-dortmund.de>,
	   wb@arb-phys.uni-dortmund.de (Wilhelm B. Kloke) writes:

   > I ran into the following problem. I am serving diskless workstations
   > on FreeBSD (2.2, if that matters). I want the users of these
   > workstations to be able to mount their local disks, floppies and
   > CD-ROM, and use local swap space, if available. The man pages

   Some systems (Linux for one, I think) have a 'user' mount flag, to
   enable ordinary non-root users to mount devices.

   > mount(2) tell me, that the mount syscall needs superuser privilege.
   > But I don't want those users to be superusers.

   But I guess, if having the above functionality, mount would have to
   be setuid for it to work.

   Perhaps there is some good reason why FreeBSD (and Net, Open?) don't
   have this feature?

Er, OpenBSD does.  By default users cannot do mounting.  But you can
use a sysctl to enable it.  For a number of security reasons, by
default you do not want it enabled.
--
This space not left unintentionally unblank.		deraadt@openbsd.org
www.OpenBSD.org -- We're fixing security problems so you can sleep at night.
(If it wasn't so fascinating I might get some sleep myself...)