Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 116670
mount prints confusing error message when user passes it two directories to mount
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:37 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040217 Description of problem: Assume there are two user-mountable dirs in /etc/fstab, and a user attempts to mount them both with a single command line (if it works with umount, it should work with mount, right?) It turns out that mount prints a very confusing error message. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): util-linux-2.12pre-3 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: As a non-root user, given that /foo and /bar are user-mountable, run: 1.mount /foo 2.mount /bar 3.umount /foo /bar 4.mount /foo /bar 5.su - 6.mount /foo /bar Actual Results: 1-3 work; 4 fails with: mount: only root can do that. 6 explains why: mount: /foo is not a block device. Expected Results: it would be nice if mount could print a less confusing error message, say, only root can specify both device name and mount point Additional info:
mount can't figure out the exact actual error message until it has tried doing the mount. This would be a security hole for non-root users, and I believe the "only root can do that" error message can be triggered by situations other than specifying both a device name and mount point. The upshot is that not much can change without causing other problems.