I'm not sure what the default policy should be though - most people are happy about not having to go to the commandline to get access to their partitions and some people have more or less valid security concerns.
OK, I've had some time to think this over. Traditionally, the default is on the open - all inclusive side of things unless there is the possibility of damage. e.g., tcp_wrapper defaults to open, iptable defaults to open. You must intervene to secure the system.
As long as the drives are only detected and mount points made, it don't have a problem. If the drives are *mounted*, I have a real problem. By mounting the drive, you may suddenly cause a drive to get fsck'ed by a newer program that oopses older kernels, or relabeled by SE Linux which will oops older kernels.
No mounting!
Even thought I have hand edited my fstab and hal made mount points, it appears not to have mounted the drives.
Based on a suggestion from Jeff yesterday, I went and tuned my /etc/hal/hald.conf file for false, false, false. On next boot, the mount points disappeared. Then I re-installed hal. My config file was renamed hald.cond.rpmorig. :( There needs to be a %config(noreplace) for hald.conf in the spec file.
Also, on first boot, hal ignores my wishes and puts the mount points there. I haven't tried a reboot yet to see if on second boot they go away. Not sure yet if this is a regression from yesterdays updates or just a first boot behavior.
Next question, is there supposed to be a /media/cdrom mount point? or is it still /dev/cdrom? Or both?
Those files, hal device information files, or .fdi files, are meant to contain *facts* about certain devices, e.g. this device that looks like a mass storage device to the kernel is in fact really a mp3 player/ camera/whatever.
I am wondering about people that have /usr as nfs? I think that's why things that have a bearing on config keep a copy in /etc. For example, timezone data. The master copy is under /usr somewhere, but its copied to /etc.
-Steve Grubb
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