OpenEuphoria

Re: [OT] Linux versus floppy

• Posted by jbrown105 at speedymail.org Jun 10, 2003
• 387 views

On Mon, Jun 09, 2003 at 11:20:44PM +0100, Pete Lomax wrote:
> 
> 
> On Mon, 9 Jun 2003 14:59:31 -0400, irvm at ellijay.com wrote:
> 
> I've put [OT] is the subject header where it belongs 
> 
> >I don't exactly know what supermount is supposed to do, but I 
> >can tell you that it doesn't work for me. 
> on your system it may be automount or just auto ?
> 
> Pete
> 

Not sure what is meant by 'auto'.

I believe supermount is a setuid program that enabled certain users to mount/
umount certain devices (such as /dev/cdrom or /dev/fd0). The idea was to enable
users to be able to mount cd-roms and such w/o needing to bother the sysadmin.
(This is obsoleted by the 'users' flag in fstab, which basicly allows
plain mount/umount to do the same thing.)

I've never used supermount, I use automount on a daily basis however.

automount is in 2 parts: a daemon and a filesystem. The file system can either
be a kernel fs (in which case the type of the fs is 'automount(pid)' where
'pid' is the pid of the daemon) or a modifed NFS server (in which case the
type of the fs is 'nfs'). Normally you'd use the kernel fs, but thats a minor
technical detail.

What you do, is mount the automount fs on a directory, say '/misc' ... then,
when you try to access, say, '/misc/cdrom', the automount fs sends a message to
the daemon. The automount daemon (which runs as root) mounts the preconfigured
device onto /misc/cdrom. After a preconfigured amount of time has passed with
no accesses to /misc/cdrom, the automount daemon will unmount it. This is all
done transparently (and is not dependant on the user who first tries to access
'/misc/cdrom' having root permissions for the mount to occur).

Of course, the above basicly has nothing to do with the original question
being asked... if this were a Linux mailing list I'd ask for more details
(such as if there was a kernel OOPS, if so to show a copy of it, what happens
when you try to write to the floppy in the linux console as opposed to in the
X session, what the output of 'cp /dev/fd0 /tmp/fd0;file /tmp/fd0' is,
and what is your kernel version and what drivers do you have compiled in)
but since this is for Euphoria, I'll just hold my breath. ;]

jbrown

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