[HECnet] Raspberry Pi + SIMH VAX?

[Dave McGuire]

On 06/05/2012 11:32 AM, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:
...
I am looking at trying to mount an external hard drive or SSD to handle the disk images instead of the SD card. For some ^$%^$%   reason you can't mount a disk as a user in Linux (I might be missing something, admittedly) like you can in RSX and VMS (again, more demonstration that UNIX sucks ;)) so I have to futz about as root to do that.

You can set that to be allowed with the "user" option, see "man fstab".   It defaults to not allowed, which is the correct security answer.   (I would assume the same is true in DEC operating systems that have protection mechanisms... it certainly is in RSTS.)

That means you have to enable it for each volume? That's a pain when you are dealing with dynamic volume devices and USB. In VMS this kind of stuff is decided on the USER account, not on the OS setup. I can see why people love VMS so much now...

I believe you can do it for USB across the board, but I'm not sure of the details.

  You can.   This is done through the udev subsystem.   It involves
writing a "udev rule" which matches the device (or device class) in
question, and then taking some action (which can be set permissions,
create a symlink, run a shell script, etc etc) when that rule is matched.

  It's very flexible.   Perhaps sometimes TOO flexible, but it gets the
job done in a clean way.

                      -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA