M.Rudra wrote: > The system has a partition and allows access to windows via linux but > as root (is that safe ?...not sure about user's. ?- how do i find out > ?) So root can write, but normal users can't? Or can normal users not even read it? It's "safe" as in support for vfat is very good, so you're not going to lose data to a filesystem bug. [1] It's good practice not to use root more often than necessary, so you may want to give normal users *more* access: investigate the dmask and fmask options in man mount and man fstab. (Unlike "real" Unix-like filesystems, vfat has no support for user ids and very little support for permissions. Under Linux, you'll find that all files on a vfat partition have the same permissions. This is good for your purposes: if one file is safe, then they all are). You might want to set up a group for accessing the vfat partition: put your normal user account in it, so it can read and write, and leave your development user account out, so it can't write to the partition. I don't know if you know how to read ls -l output: take a look at http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Unix-and-Internet-Fundamentals-HOWTO/disk-layout.html#permissions > If i create a *User* for testing packages what options should i turn > off and what permission flags need to be set. I am not conversant with > command line interfaces so any links to finding that info is also > useful. Do they differ for each package/program ? Just make sure that it is a different user with a different user ID: that's automatic, and the rest of the security is automatic, too. Unix and Fedora security is designed to cope with one central (large) computer for a university's worth of mischievous undergrads, and prevent any of them messing around with any other account. To be paranoid, you might want to run find ~ -type d -o -type f -perm -2 -ls to check that there are no world-writable files in your home directory. James. [1] Well: it's *extremely* unlikely. -- James Wilkinson | Power corrupts, PowerPoint corrupts absolutely. Exeter Devon UK | -- Vint Cerf E-mail address: james | @westexe.demon.co.uk |
