Local workstation permissions was: Why newbies don't RTFM... 4752

It is similar, but I was trying to describe something finer-grained and more flexible than the checking mount does with fstab, that would allow something like your example here. So saying "mount-wrapper -t smbfs-machine-sharemnt-somewhere" would check the type of mount and the mount point, and then if it's configured to allow you1 to mount smbfs fileystems undermnt (which I buttume would be desireable for a single-user workstation) would do the mount, without requiring that specific network system and mount point to be in fstab with a "user" option and then allowing any user (local or not) to mount it like mount would.

This is also more general, since appropriate wrappers can be built around any tool that needs higher privileges to run, whether or not they already can be configured to allow mortals to invoke some subset of their functionality. (I don't think there's a sensible way to write a single fully general wrapper, but I can't imagine any tool that wouldn't allow a suitable wrapper to be written somehow.)

dave

1 I'd been thinking of "you" as "a user buttigned to the locally-logged- in group due to being logged in through XDM or on tty1-12", but it can also be "the user buttigned to this workstation", or "Any mere mortal", or even something silly like "a user with an odd number of vowels in their username" or "a user with a prime UID".

-- I want to congratulate PR on the phrase "land-based banana controls", which (a) left me sputtering, (b) offers splendid scope for a John Cleese routine, and (c) produces zero Google hits. --Chris Redmond in uw.general