I was part of the disk group when my MBR was overwritten because I'd been doing some work on the drives and don't like sudo. Isn't it still a bug in wine that the MBR was overwritten in the first place, even if I'm in the disks group or running as root?
If sudo is too much pain (and it must be since I have never really used it), just do $ su - #
I guess Oliver got what he had asked for :( Wine bug nothwithstanding ;)
Yes of course that's a bug in Wine. But what I meant is that the security model of Linux if correctly applied (i.e. people don't have rights to make things they are not supposed to do) would prevent such things to happen.
So is the conclusion that users need to set up a special new user with super restrictive rights to protect the system from bugs in wine?! My confidence in wine has just taken a knock.
Nope. I don't think that any decent distribution comes with world-writable raw hard drive devices. Even if "world writable" really means "everyone is in the group that has write rights".
My FC4 system (hand upgraded through the ages from RH7, through everything in between) sets the raw hard drive devices with read only for disk group, and no users are in that group anyway.
I'm puzzled as to what distribution would have user-writeable raw devices. I'd bet that someone somewhere messed things up for the users that were affected by that problem.
The "super restrictive" rights that you're talking about are *default* on every self-respecting distro. It actually takes some work to change them.
Cheers, Kuba
PS. Just in case: I don't buy the argument that having access to cd burner requires such hacks. Either manually set hdwhatever to be writeable by you, or (on udev systems) change udev device permissions in relevant config files.