-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Sure, in theory. You'll forfeit all unix-ish filesystem thingies by doing this withoug UMSDOS. If you do it with UMSDOS then you'll leave the floppy in a state the end user won't understand. One of the problems is what to do about non-8.3 filenames. If you mount the disk as vfat (that's an option in Linux isn't it?) then you should be ok with the long filenames. Thinking... Oh yes, directory permissions. Won't /home take on user's umask since there aren't any real permissions? Watch out for that and keep nosy people off of the same box. It's likely that this means you either tweak umask or make the boxes single user. Joshua b. Jore http://www.greentechnologist.org On Wed, 30 Jan 2002, Ben Stallings wrote: > Here's a hypothetical question that I've been toying with. Is it feasible to > designate /home as /dev/fd0? How about if the floppy in question is an > MS-DOS disk? > > Here's a scenario where I think this might make sense. You have a public > computer lab that people walk into to do work, e.g. Web research or > development, OpenOffice word processing, etc. These people want to take > their work with them when they leave, both so that they can open their files > on other (probably Windows) computers, and so that other people in the lab > can't open their files -- not even the sysadmins. > > So the lab is a network of Linux workstations, each of which has a floppy > drive. One of the machines has two floppy drives and runs a special > menu-driven program that lets people create accounts in the shared passwd > file (writing a username directory to their floppy disk containing basic > config files, .login et al.), back up their files to a second floppy, etc. > > When the user sits down at one of the workstations, she puts her disk into > the drive before logging in. The workstation finds her login name in the > shared passwd database and finds her files in /home/username, which is > /dev/fd0/username. Her Web bookmarks, e-mail address book, and files are all > on that floppy, which she takes with her when she leaves and can open on any > Windows machine. > > I know there are inherent limitations to this plan, since 1.4 MB isn't as > much space as it used to be, and Windows has trouble with some UNIX file > naming conventions and so could inadvertantly screw up the home directory. > I'm not actually planning to do it. But I'm curious: could it work? --Ben > > _______________________________________________ > Twin Cities Linux Users Group Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > http://www.mn-linux.org > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > https://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (OpenBSD) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE8WHZQfexLsowstzcRAuEXAKDeUC8wxn+8WgptSsMICOR0KrN0lACfcDxj YRuxL5MxMerpcwbrqcz4W20= =20ca -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----