Re: Question about mounting MS-DOS partition
On Sat, 27 Mar 1999, George Bonser wrote:
> Because only root can write to an MSDOS partition and you do not want to
> be root doing normal things. In other words, you should only be root when
> you have to do some administrative task that requires root and then you go
> back to being a user again. Users can not write to MSDOS.
This is not quite true. By default, you're right, but mount will take a
uid/gid option and set all the mounted files to that owner/group. How
else do regular users write to a DOS floppy? Also, as long as you put a
read-only section, say /usr, on the vfat partition, you'll be okay.
Off the top of my head, here are the reasons I wouldn't do it:
1. Security. DOS doesn't have the file permisions for a multiuser system,
and I wouldn't trust it.
2. If it breaks, how do you fix it? There's no fsck for vfat.
3. Lots of programs are going to assume a unix-type file system. Debian
itself, for instance, will probably break into little tiny pieces on a
file system without symlinks.
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