
Welcome to XFSTOOL


WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT:

xfstool is a simple X11-based tool to mount/unmount 
floppydisks, create a filesystem and shutdown the
computer.

This is espacially useful for workplaces at home, where the
user does not want to switch to superuser. (Well, I don't like
to write my programs as root, for I might damage some files
when I got my 10 windows, and some are not under my homedirectory,
but I like to do backups on floppy)

Because it takes some input for "su - -c mount..." and sudo
isn't a picknick either, I prefer a window based method to
do this job (like under OS/2, where the user can shutdown
his system)

xfstool creates at most four buttons, one to mount a filesystem,
one to unmount it, one to create a new filesystem on disk and one
to shutdown the system. The buttons, which apply to a user, are defined
in xfstool.perm, which contains a list of users and their allowed actions.
This file looks like:

username	fs
otherusername	f
stillanotherone	s

where fs means: floppy & shutdown, s: shutdown and f: floppy.

When the mount-button is selected, a new directory /drive is
created, and /dev/fd0 is mounted to it. The uid is changed to 
the user's uid, the gid to the user's gid. This prevents other
users from accessing the disk. The disk is mounted nosuid, to
prevent executing "home made" suid programs (this is a weak method
of bringing some security into this program).

The shutdown-button reboots the system immediately. So this is useful
only on a single-user system (like the most systems at home).


ATTENTION: 
There are some potential securityholes in the usage of this application.
So, if your site is concerned about security, better don't use it.


INSTALLATION:

Look at the Makefile and modify the values, if neccessary.
FLOPPY is the floppy device, DIR the mountpoint (which will
be created on execution), PERM the location of the permission file.
FSTYPE one of ext, ext2, msdos, minix or whatever your kernel supports.
SHUTDOWNMESSAGE is the message displayed on reboot; you can specify the time
until the shutdown will wait before rebooting the computer with DELAY;
MOUNT, UMOUNT, MKFS and SHUTDOWN are the locations of the relevant programs. 
XAWLIB is set to Xaw3d; if you don't have libXaw3d, use Xaw instead. 
The program will go to INSTBINDIR, the manpage to INSTMANDIR.

Do -as root- a: make install.

Now you have to change the permissions file to your needs.
Go to /usr/local/lib (or whereever you have set the PERM-variable to)
and create/edit the xfstool.perm-file.

That's it. Call xfstool at startup in your .xsession or .xinit-scripts.

(You might want to use: "xfstool -geo 100 &" There should be no y-size be
given, for this is set by the application!)

Read the LICENSE and COPYRIGHT, if you are interested in this stuff.

Please report any bugs (and if you like the program, this too) to:

eichner@rhrk.uni-kl.de


AUTHOR:

Torsten Eichner, eichner@rhrk.uni-kl.de
