Mounting floppies with autofs and reasonable permissions
 

Hi,
I'm setting up a Linux box for my school, and I need to use autofs to mount and unmount floppies because students don't understand the concept of mounting something and unmounting it. I've gotten autofs to work fine except that when the floppy is mounted only root can write to it. I tried changing the user option in my auto.misc file, and changing the permissions on the device file, but no luck. How do I set it up so that a normal user can write to the floppy?
Thanks,
Ben Weintraub

What does your fstab entry for the floppy look like?
Does the mount-point-directory have the appropriate permissions aswell (i.e. can normal users write to it normally, mounting it manually)?

I was under the (perhaps mistaken?) conception that the mount points for autofs weren't regular directories, but directories under /misc or /auto that came in and out of exsistence when things were mounted/unmounted. I really can't change the permissions on the mount point if that is the case. I will try editing the fstab entry for it though. What would a good fstab entry for it look like?

I believe that for the 'Automount' function that comes with Mandy to work, the only option you need to change is the file-system. If you change this to 'autofs' and then ensure that the automounting daemon is running (I haven't a clue what it's called - sorry, I don't use it anymore).