Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
Utility software is system software designed to help analyze, configure, optimize or maintain a computer. A single piece of utility software is usually called a utility or tool....
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
A file system is a means to organize data expected to be retained after a program terminates by providing procedures to store, retrieve and update data, as well as manage the available space on the device which contain it. A file system organizes data in an efficient manner and is tuned to the...
is ready to use, and associates it with a particular point in the system's file system hierarchy (its mount point). The counterpart umount instructs the operating system that the file system should be disassociated from its mount point, making it no longer accessible. The mount and umount commands require root user privilege or the corresponding fine-grained privilege, unless the file system is defined as "user mountable" in the /etc/fstab
Fstab
The fstab file is a system configuration file commonly found on Unix systems. The fstab file typically lists all available disks and disk partitions, and indicates how they are to be initialized or otherwise integrated into the overall system's file system...
file (which can only be modified by the root user).
Use
The second partition of a hard disk is mounted with the command:
ISO 9660, also referred to as CDFS by some hardware and software providers, is a file system standard published by the International Organization for Standardization for optical disc media....
The fstab file is a system configuration file commonly found on Unix systems. The fstab file typically lists all available disks and disk partitions, and indicates how they are to be initialized or otherwise integrated into the overall system's file system...
Wrapper generally refers to a type of packaging, such as a flat sheet made out of paper, cellophane or plastic to enclose an object.Wrapper may also refer to:* Wrapper , a woman's garment which is worn over nightwear or lingerie...
around the standard mount program which permits normal users to mount removable devices without a matching /etc/fstab
Fstab
The fstab file is a system configuration file commonly found on Unix systems. The fstab file typically lists all available disks and disk partitions, and indicates how they are to be initialized or otherwise integrated into the overall system's file system...
entry. This provides a robust basis for automounting
Automounter
An automounter is any program or software facility which automatically mounts filesystems in response to access operations by user programs. An automounter system utility , when notified of file and directory access attempts under selectively monitored subdirectory trees, dynamically and...
frameworks like GNOME's Utopia project and confines the amount of code that runs as root to a minimum.
This package also contains a wrapper "pmount-hal" which reads information such as device labels and mount options from HAL
HAL (software)
HAL was a software project providing a hardware abstraction layer for Unix-like computer systems.HAL is now deprecated on GNU/Linux systems, with functionality being merged into udev as of 2008–2010...
and passes them to pmount.
To configure, the administrator would add a list of devices to /etc/pmount.allow that non-root users can mount:
The gnome-mount package contains programs for mounting, unmounting and ejecting storage devices. The goal for gnome-mount is for GNOME software such as gnome-volume-manager and GNOME-VFS to use this instead of invoking mount/umount/eject/pmount or direct HAL invoking methods (GNOME previously used pmount). gnome-mount is not intended for direct use by users.
All the gnome-mount programs utilize HAL methods and as such run unprivileged. The rationale for gnome-mount is to have a centralized place (in GConf
GConf
GConf is a system used by the GNOME desktop environment for storing configuration settings for the desktop and applications.Changes to this system are controlled by GConfd, a daemon. GConfd watches out for changes to the database, and when they are changed, it applies the new settings to...
) where settings such as mount options and mount locations are maintained.
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