Re: adding a user to a group

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 11:11:38PM -0500, Kent West wrote:
> Assuming your CD-ROM drive is on /dev/cdrom:
> 
> EnJaeLove[westk]:/home/westk> ls -l /dev/cdrom
> lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root            3 Aug 11  2001 /dev/cdrom -> hdc
> 
> So now I look at /dev/hdc.
> 
> EnJaeLove[westk]:/home/westk> ls -l /dev/hdc 
> brw-rw----    1 root     disk      22,   0 May 12  2001 /dev/hdc
> 
> So, to have read/write access to the CDROM drive, I'd need to be in the 
> "disk" group. However, looking quickly at the permissions on the hard 
> drive at /dev/hda:
> 
> EnJaeLove[westk]:/home/westk> ls -l /dev/hda
> brw-rw----    1 root     disk       3,   0 May 12  2001 /dev/hda
> 
> which means that if I put this user into the "disk" group, he'll have 
> direct read/write access to the raw hard drive device. Hmm, do I really 
> want to do that?

You almost certainly don't; group disk is effectively root access. If
/dev/hdc is a CD-ROM, it'd be better to 'chgrp cdrom /dev/hdc'.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]