mounting iso without root privileges?

grayFalcon · 05-21-2006, 02:56 AM

Hello everybody!

I'm just wondering...

Code:

mount -t iso9660 -o loop,ro ./foo.iso ./foo_mnt_dir

tells me that I need to be root to do this.
All solutions that I found to this involve either entering the mount point and the image into fstab or becoming root.

This seems a bit dirty to me - I don't see why I would need to be root to mount an iso image from my home dir into a subdirectory within my home dir...

Is there any way to get around this? Like entering something into fstab that will allow -loop mounts for every user?

Thanks a lot in advance,
-Wojtek

acid_kewpie · 05-21-2006, 03:09 AM

there is no wat with the kernel space toolsl like mount, but there is the fuse project which i know very little abuot, but is all about user space filesystem interactions. it looks like the current versions of fuse (now also part of the kernel since 2.6.14 apparently) contain a binary called mountlo which should do what you are after.

grayFalcon · 05-21-2006, 03:19 AM

Thanks a lot for the tip, I'll have a look at it asap!

r0b0 · 05-23-2006, 06:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by grayFalcon

This seems a bit dirty to me - I don't see why I would need to be root to mount an iso image from my home dir into a subdirectory within my home dir...

Well, sorry to dissapoint you but this is how unix works. Mounting a filesystem is considered an administrative task and generally requires root.

You can try to find or create a suid-bit "mount" type of program that would allow users to mount filesystems according to some policy (e.g. only mount inside their home dir, only mount as noexec, nosuid, nodev, etc.)

One such example is called "pmount" and it is used to mount hot-pluggable devices automatically.