userland|unprivileged file system handling tools

[Bob Bishop]

Hi,

At 01:45 23/03/2004, Luigi Rizzo <rizzo at icir.org> wrote:
>We seem to lack tools that allow the generation/handling of file
>system images without root privs. The 'standard techniques' used
>to build the bootable floppies rely on vnconfig/mdconfig, disklabel,
>fsck and mknod which all must run as root.
>
>Colin Percival pointed me to ports/sysutils/makefs which builds an
>almost correct fs image -- it has a couple of bugs, one which is
>trivially fixed, the other one which could be cured by a pass of
>fsck. There is still the issue of creating a label for the image
>(which right now i do using a small C program), and handling device
>nodes (not an issue on 5.x, but this could be possibly fixed with
>some makefs extension).
>
>So:
>
>   + is there interest in having makefs become part of the
>     standard system, instead of a port ?

Why not just teach newfs to work on a plain file too, ...

>   + how hard would it be to teach disklabel and fsck to
>     work on files (filesystem images) as well as devices ?

... which really shouldn't be hard. Although you might want to have the 
capability protected by an option to avoid mistakenly creating weird files 
under /dev.

>cheers
>luigi
>
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--
Bob Bishop		    +44 (0)118 977 4017
rb at gid.co.uk		fax +44 (0)118 989 4254