| gabriel rosenkoetter on Tue, 25 Dec 2001 00:54:00 -0500 |
|
On Mon, Dec 24, 2001 at 06:08:25PM -0500, Bill Jonas wrote:
> Oh. I didn't notice that his user was the owner of the device file.
> I'm not used to individual users having ownership of devices. (Which I
> think is a bad idea anyway.)
Are you logged into your machine via X right now? Go look at who
owns /dev/console. How 'bout who owns the {p,t}ty you're typing at?
Users owning devices having to do with the physical console is a
totally okay thing and happens all the time. It's the easiest way to
deal with giving those users useful access to the console they're
sitting at. Anyone who's got (physical) console access effectively
has root access if they want it anyhow. (If you don't like it, you
can always go change /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm/GiveConsole.)
> No, I did mean cdrom. I'm unsure of how other distributions do it, but
> with Debian, all the disk devices have group ownership of "disk". There
> is also a "cdrom" group, which is the proper group to own CD-ROM
> devices. This way if you want to grant 660 permissions to CD-ROMs, you
> don't give R/W access to other disks to users you want to have access to
> the CD-ROM.
Fair enough. Back in the day, we didn't use a group for this but a
user (operator), to which people who properly had operator privelege
could su and do what they needed to do. (See, /dev/*st* devices on
BSD machines.) But that's obviously kind of a blunt edge, and using
groups gives you finer control.
(Even groups are a bit too blunt. Which is why I'm behind getting a
decent ACL system into the file systems in free Unix-like operating
systems. There are some idiots out there--I'll be glad to point
anyone interested to specific messages in the NetBSD mailing list
archives if they want evidence of the idiocy--who claim that ACLs
are totally unnecessary. Hopefully, somoene will just code up ACLs
in a reasonable way, and those folks will be forced to shut the hell
up.)
Anyway, back to the point at hand: that cdrom device should have
worked just fine and, evidently, did with several other peices of
uiserland software, so whatever the original KDE/Gnome/whatever it
was CD player that couldn't make audio was the broken piece of the
puzzle.
--
gabriel rosenkoetter
gr@eclipsed.net
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