[plug] Just started with linux, need help

[Ari Finander]

Christian,

     Tried your advice and edited the fstab file as root...now the system 
will let me access the 'usermount' GUI but it still says that mounting of 
devices is restricted to superuser.  For those of you tuning into this late, 
my goal is to be able to get regular users to be able to access floppy, 
cdrom, and cdrive.
     For the internet, when I try and use the kppp program (it's the only 
one I know of) to access using my user account, it gives me this error box:

"pppd is not properly installed!

The ppd binary must be installed with the SUID bit set.  Contact your system 
administrator."

Any tips on how to get this running right?  I'm at a loss.  I'm still not 
clear at what the list of terms means from christian's previous email (see 
below): user,async,noauto,exec,nosuid.
    Something that I either read or was written in one of these emails is to 
put users into a group and give that group internet proveledges.  How is 
this done?

    Finally, anyone stampeding to get the McAfee for linux/unix?  :-)

Again, thanks for your help,

Ari
strictform at hotmail.com


----Original Message Follows----
From: Christian <christian at global.net.au>
Reply-To: plug at linux.org.au
To: plug at linux.org.au
Subject: Re: [plug] Just started with linux, need help
Date: Sat, 02 Oct 1999 03:33:42 +0000



The point and click system for Windows is nice - but the Linux system is
*mostly* just fine once you get used to it.  The only time it really
sucks is when you have to swap between lots of floppies/CDROMs.

I would suggest not setting your CD to mount at boot-up - unless you
*always* need the same CD mounted every time you start your system.
Allowing normal users to mount the CD/floppy as needed is a more
flexible approach.  Firstly, make sure you know which IDE port your
CDROM is on.  It's usually the one accessed by the /dev/hdc device
(secondary master IDE) but it will depend on the configuration of the
drives in your machine.  You can find out easily by typing: "dmesg|grep
CD", for example:
ophelia:~$ dmesg|grep CD
hdd: Pioneer CD-ROM ATAPI Model DR-A14S 0104, ATAPI CDROM drive
hdd: ATAPI 32X CD-ROM drive, 128kB Cache
Uniform CDROM driver Revision: 2.55

...tells me that my CDROM is on /dev/hdd - secondary slave IDE.  I'm
going to assume for the rest that your CDROM is /dev/hdc.  Also, to make
things easier and more flexible in the future, you can create a symbolic
link to a more memorable name from this, for example:
ln -s /dev/hdc /dev/cdrom
Means you can access /dev/hdc by the name /dev/cdrom.

Now, to allow ordinary users to accss your CDROM you need to specify
this in your /etc/fstab (filesystem table).  As root, open this file in
your favourite editor (you may want to make a backup copy first: "cp
/etc/fstab ~/fstab.backup").  Then add the lines to the end:

/dev/cdrom  /cdrom  iso9660  user,async,noauto,exec,ro,nosuid	0  0
/dev/fd0   /floppy  vfat     user,async,noauto,exec,nosuid 	0  0

The first field specifies the device (our newly created symbolic link
/dev/cdrom and the floppy device /dev/fd0).  The second specifies the
mount points (if you don't have these mount points then you will need to
create empty directories for them - or modify the above to refer to
mount points that do exist).  The next is the filesystem type (ISO9660
for CDROMs and vfat for floppies - all my disks are Win95 so I use
this).  The next are options separated by commas - I'm not going to go
into details about all of them but the "user" option allows ordinary
users (non-root) to mount these.  The last two fields relate to
automatic backups and filesystem checks - don't worry too much about
them.  Once you're happy with your new /etc/fstab you can save it.  I
also suggest you read the "fstab" and "mount" man pages ("man fstab" and
"man mount") which explain what you just did. :-)

Now ordinary users can mount CDROMs and floppies by typing: "mount
/cdrom" OR "mount /floppy" respectively.  There are some GUI tools to
facilitate this also - GNOME includes some you can stick on the panel
and just click on to mount, I don't know what KDE provides.

As for wanting to connect to the Internet as non-root, I don't know the
best way to achieve this in Red Hat - you'll have to ask someone who
uses that distribution.  There are certainly plenty of options from a
small setuid root wrapper program to running a Masq Dialing server on
your machine and allowing your users to access this through a local
client (it's overkill but it provides a nice GUI interface to the whole
process.)

As for the vmware issue, you can get a temporary free license when you
download the program (http://www.vmware.com/) although this does expire
after a month or something.  I forget how much it costs (it's on the web
page) but it's not too much.  The only issue with vmware is that it will
run things noticeably slower.  My recommendation to you is to use vmware
for Win95 apps that she absolutely needs and cannot be replicated on
Linux and use Linux native apps for all the rest - it shouldn't be a
major transition really.  Alternately, she could just boot the computer
into Win95 when she needs to.

Hope this helps...

Regards,

Christian.

--
Tact is the ability to tell a man he has an open mind when he has a
hole in his head.

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