Workstaion mount-umount problems

[Alistair Crust]

Ok, so heres my problem

We have a server for NIS and NFS home directory's then 4 servers running
deb sarge and ltsp 4.1. All set to mount /home from the main server and
act as NIS clients. 

While I'v be trying to get LDA to work with dapper on a test server its
been getting to that time of year where all the 6th form students are
finishing exam work and want to bring work to and from home on a
pen-drive/cdrom/floppy and copy to/back up from there user space.

So in the mean time I install a fat client with an NFS mounted /home and
NIS client configured. Expecting the kids to be able to mount
pen-drives/cdroms/floppy. Wrong!

Because they are not local users they cannot mount/umount drives.

I have got it to accept pen-drives and cdroms by adding the + group to
cdrom/floppy/plugdev groups (a wild guess of adding + to everything the
first created user is added too, bar a few exceptions) and using the
gnome disk mounter applet. But every time I come to umount/eject it wont
let me, saying the user is not root and the device doesn't exist in
fstab.

If they can mount a device.... why can't they unmount it? You would have
thought this would work. If you can log into a box you should be able to
use the local media without any changes to the system whether your local
or not.

Does anyone have any ideas or know if using LDAP would be better than
NIS for authenticating users.

-- 
Kind regards
Alistair Crust
Systems Administrator 
Skegness Grammar School 
Vernon Road 
Skegness 
PE25 2QS 
TEL: 01754 610000 (ext'852)
FAX: 01754 896875