[plug] Just started with linux, need help

[Greg Mildenhall]

On Mon, 4 Oct 1999, Christian wrote:
> Brad Campbell wrote:
> > Have you checked, that the user your trying to mount from has the 'user'
> > group in thier list.
> > Or possibly the cdrom, disk, or floppy group ?
> You don't have to be in any specials groups at all to be able to mount
> devices specified with the "user" option in fstab.  *Any* user can mount
> the device if this option is enabled.

Really? I'd be absolutely shocked if the kernel's behaviour was affected
by a file in /etc at runtime. I'm _sure_ you still have to be root to
mount a volume, regardless of the contents of fstab. AFAIU, fstab is
entirely for the benefit of the mount program. As such, you will need to
have permission to run mount as root. For this, mount must be SUID, be
owned by user root, and belong some group of which you are a member, (or
else world executable, which is not a good idea) and executable by the
group. Hence:

chown root.$GROUP `which pppd`
chmod 4750 `which pppd`

Will do the trick, where $GROUP is the appropriate dialout group for
Redhat, and you have editted /etc/groups to put yourself in that group.
Could some Redhat-using sadist let us know the value of $GROUP? Thanks.

Perhaps even better would be to do:
ls -l `which pppd`
instead, which should tell you what group owns the pppd binary,
then you just need to make sure you are in that group, and do the chmod.

If Unix file permissions confuse you, you either need to look them up
online, or you need to buy the aforementioned book.

-Greg