-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Wed, Nov 09, 2016 at 10:57:23AM -0500, Phil Susi wrote: > On 11/9/2016 9:43 AM, to...@tuxteam.de wrote: > > unless root has set up fstab accordingly, to name but one variant. > > fstab has nothing to do with it. That only lets you mount and unmount > existing filesystems.
It sure has. The sysadmin can set up an fstab entry with the 'user' option; she specifies a device (or an UUID, or a label) and a mount point. The (regular) user can then mount, wihout any special privileges. > > This is a red herring. Hand-checking permissions in an application > > is unnecessary and is a layering violation (OS should take care of > > that, and it pretty well does). And... I can perfectly well > > mkfs.ext4 as a regular user on a block device. It's just *mount* > > You don't *have* a block device on which to mkfs. Unless you know its offset whithin the containing block device, to which you do have access (in the mentioned cases of an OS file viz. a device). You don't need any loop device for that. You need he loop device for *mounting* the file system, not for mkfs. > That's why you need root and some sort of block device, like loop on > which you can activate a partition block device. For activating (i.e. mounting), yes. Not for mkfs. regards - -- tomás -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAlgjhnEACgkQBcgs9XrR2kbPFQCfYnNPju3on7SKEAv2rx8Piqlp oM8An3HuAzIJnxMkBMrX991PU8AreNpi =gEGi -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
