LWN: Comments on "cdrecord trouble"

cdrecord trouble

arafel — 2004-09-20T10:48:02+00:00

Has he removed the text which claims you're not allowed to modify parts of the program yet? If not, I suspect most distributions won't pick up the latest version, but will just backport the changes.

cdrecord as root

rfunk — 2004-09-18T16:24:03+00:00

Another option for giving cdrecord the root privileges it wants is to
trust only certain users with the ability to run it as root.

I use sudo to run cdrecord, with myself in the cdrom group and the
following line in /etc/sudoers:

%cdrom ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/cdrecord, /usr/bin/cdrdao

(OK, so the "cdrom" group is misnamed here....)

cdrecord trouble

garloff — 2004-09-17T09:10:00+00:00

It is not true that SUSE does disallow non-root users to burn CDs/DVDs.

It is true, however, that SUSE does not install cdrecord setuid root.
For this to work, the user needs write permission to the CD recorder
device obviously.

(This will not allow cdrecord to pin memory or use realtime scheduling,
but most recorders have buffer-underrun protection mechanisms (burnfree
and friends) these days, so this is a minor issue.
And SUSE enabled burnfree by default.)

There's two ways to make this work:
* The classical Un*x approach: Add users that should be allowed to burn
CDs to a group and change the device permissions accordingly.
* The modern way: Upon (graphical) login, provide the local user with
a set of permissions defined by the sysadmin. resmgr does handle this
on SUSE Linux systems.