[SWLUG] Mandrake 9.1, cannot mount

[Mark Fisher]

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On Friday 11 July 2003 4:28 pm, STEPHEN CONSTANTINOU wrote:
> Dear All
>
> I have recently upgraded from mandrake 8.2
> to 9.1.
>
> I have set up Mandrake to automatically log
> me into KDE as a user.  There is only one user
> (stephanos) and Root.
>
> The user desktop contains two Icons for
> mounting the floppy and CDROM, placed there
> at installation, not by  me.  When I try to
> mount the floppy I get the message:
>    "Could not enter dir /mnt/floppy"
> When I try to mount a CDRom I just get an
> empty Konqueror window.
> I can use Konqueror to view/copy/move files
> to and from the windows hard drive/partition.
> Though no icon is present on the desktop.
>
> While still as a user I tried to mount the
> drives in a terminal window:
>   mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
> This brings a message: "only root can do that"
>
>   mount -t ext2 /dev/floppy /mnt/floppy
> This brings a message: "only root can do that"
>
>   mount -t msdos /dev/floppy /mnt/floppy
> This brings a message: "only root can do that"
>
> Lucky old Root.
>
> Undetered I logged in as Root I had a look at
> the permissions for the windows partition:

And what happens when you use the mount command when logged in as root [ or, 
to save time, su into root ] ?

There is a reason why only root can mount and umount a filesystem.  Not only 
security whereby in a mutliuser environment your users can accidentally break 
your system for you, but also in order to register with the kernel the 
command needs to run with root privs.

- From your email, I get the impression you only ran the commands while a mear 
user.

- -- 
	Mark
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