According to section 11.5 of rhl-install-guide-en-6.0-2 users added to the 'floppy' group should have access to the floppy drive(s) even when they are not logged-in at the console. There are currently two reasons why this fails: First, in dev-2.7.7-1 the floppy devices do belong to the correct group, but no group permisions are granted (mode=600). Second, the file /etc/security/console.perms (from pam-0.66-18) will cause the group permissions to be zeroed (again mode=600) everytime somebody logs in or out at the console, making the problem in the dev package pretty likely to be immaterial. It could be argued that this is a documentation bug, since both the dev and pam packages agree that no group permissions are granted on floppy devices. However, since console access is a new concept the RHL 6.0, this new documentation clearly indicates to me that floppy group access is/was intended for RHL 6.0.
You are correct. This is a bug either in /etc/security/console.perms or in the documentation. We'll decide which one after weighing the pros and cons and fix one or the other. In the meantime, you can change the last 600 in the floppy line in /etc/security/console.perms to 660 and it will work for you. Sorry for the inconvenience.
This will be changed in the next release of pam to <console> 0660 <floppy> 0660 root