autofs HOWTO

[Paul Serice <ugs@laci.net>]

This message tells how I got autofs to mount floppies so that any member
of the  "floppy" group would  have read/write permission.  I'm wondering
if what  I did is  the right approach.  If  so, and if this isn't common
knowledge (as I couldn't find it), it should be helpful to others.

The difficulty as    I see is is   that  "mount", when  mounting  "user"
volumes, by default uses the permissions of the requesting user.

When the user wants to  mount a volume, it  asks the automount daemon to
do so.  The automount  daemon in turn  calls "mount", and "mount" gladly
does it job and mounts the volume with the  permissions of the automount
daemon, not the  permissions  of  the user.  The   problem is  that  the
automount daemon  is  started  from the /etc/init.d/autofs   script with
permissions of   "root.root" and "rwxr_xr_x"  insuring  that no ordinary
user will be able to write to the floppy.

To "correct" this, I have carefully  edited the default Debian script to
change the umask to 002 just before starting the automount daemon.  Then
I start it with 'sg floppy -c "automount ...  "'. 

Now, when the automount daemon  does it's job, I  see something like the
following:

     drwxrwxr-x   2 root     floppy       7168 Dec 31  1969 ./
     drwxr-xr-x   3 root     floppy          0 Jun 28 08:24 ../
     -rw-rw-r--   1 root     floppy       9199 Jun 28 08:18 README.TXT
     -rw-rw-r--   1 root     floppy      25798 Jun 27 23:37 zer0


Thanks,
Paul Serice


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