Re: CD burning and root

[textshell neutronstar dyndns org]

On Thu, Dec 19, 2002 at 03:55:05AM -0500, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On 18 Dec 2002, Andrew Sobala wrote:
> 
> > After the previous CD burning discussion, I tried the nautilus CD
> > burner.
> > 
> > On my RH8 system, you need root access to burn a CD. This could be
> > changed, but is fairly standard.
> > 
> > If I put files in burn:///, then start up nautilus-cd-burner as root, it
> > doesn't see any files to burn (presumably burn:/// is user specific and
> > root cannot access my burn:/// folder). Starting it up using PAM doesn't
> > work either, presumably because PAM starts the application as root.
> > (Starting it up as myself works, but I can only make ISOs.)
> > 
> > Is there a way to give the application root permissions yet allow it to
> > access a user's burn:/// folder? Does this need to be implemented in the
> > code itself? It really needs to be addressed before it becomes a viable
> > CD burning utility (I know it's still alpha), and could something that
> > needs addressing at a lower level in GNOME.
> 
> You need to give the user write access to the cd writer device. This can 
> be done in various ways, on pam-based distros it typically will be done 
> using console.perms. 
> 

Hmm, I think this kind of stuff (write permission to generic scsi devices) is
quite distro and site specific and potentially also dangerous. So i would
appreciate if we could have a (documented) way for root to burn stuff for the
users. If you feel that is a option that just works around solveble problems
just document the right way, but I'm almost completly sure that there are good
reasons for a system administrator not to allow user access to the cd recorder.

Martin H.