interesting feature on AMIX..

[Frank McPherson Summer Intern]

In article <1991Jun19.204906.19339 at dvorak.amd.com> tim at amd.com (Tim Olson) writes:
>| I was looking through the docs about formatting floppies and stuff, and right
>| before it they were talking about mounting filesystems.  On the Amiga, this
>| means that we could mount a file system on the floppy, and this would definitely
>| be a selling point for universities and educational facilities because you would
>| be able to mount a filesystem for a user and that user can take his file system
>| home with him.  (hey, that would take care of quota problems!!)  Solve a lot of
>| problem in terms of disk usage on the system.  
>
>File systems should only be mountable by root.  Allowing a user to
>mount a floppy would be a big security hole.
>
>	-- Tim Olson
If you restrict the mounting to floppies on a specific subtree, it's not
that much of a security hole.  For example, you could write a small 
program which would be called by a student which would mount a floppy
disk residing in the internal disk drive to /sony, or something similar.
That is, in fact, what is done at Virginia Tech.  What we've got down 
there is a computer lab with four or five 3000UXD's which get used by
many students.  In order to avoid filling up the drives on the UXD's,
we (the students) have to bring in a floppy which we use as our own
personal travelling file system.  It works out pretty well in the end.
You could use cpio to save the stuff out and bring it back in every time
you need to use it, but it seems simpler to just mount the floppy and
use it as normal.  Fewer extraneous details for the procrastinating 
student to worry about when they're trying to print out their code at
the last minute.  8-)

- Frank McPherson     INTERNET: emcphers at manu.cs.vt.edu -