On Tuesday 21 January 2003 5:59 pm, [Bug 974] wrote: > This problem is seen in mandrake-9.0. This is not really a problem of > mount but a problem of the settings file /etc/fstab. Basically, its a > configuration problem. My windows (FAT32) partition is mounted as per > the fstab entry: > > /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 > 0 0 > > The value of umask(=0) makes many system files on the FAT32 partition > writable by a non-root linux user. This is very undesirable and > risky. In the extreme case, a well-designed linux virus can easily > damage the windows system files !! The proper solution to this is to > change the umask value to 022 so that only root has write access to > the FAT32 system.
One possible solution would be to make a "windows" group and only allow that group to access the fat32 partitions (i.e. mount it umask=002, user=root, group=windows) Doesn't solve the new-user-can't-figure-out-how-to-write-to-his-partition problem, but it does help security somewhat. -- Wesley J. Landaker - [EMAIL PROTECTED] OpenPGP FP: C99E DF40 54F6 B625 FD48 B509 A3DE 8D79 541F F830
