[HECnet] Raspberry Pi + SIMH VAX?

[Dave McGuire]

On 06/05/2012 11:03 AM, Mark Benson 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...

  UNIX "sucks" because you don't know how to use it, and its design
differs from the OS that you DO know how to use?   Interesting logic. ;)
*poke poke*

  The specifics of how to accomplish this does, however, differ from
UNIX to UNIX.   Under any modern-ish Linux system for example, this is
done automatically upon device insertion by a combination of udev, dbus,
and gvfs.   It Just Works, I've done it five or six times since lunch
today.   Of course you have to be logged into a "desktop" session in
order for it to work, but 99% of the time, that's what's going on.

  If you want to do it a different way, say when nobody is logged in,
this is easily accomplished with a udev rule that matches the device
when it's inserted, and takes some action, in this case mounts the
filesystem.   If you need to do that, let me know, and I may be able to help.

                          -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA