Looking for a way to have a portable filesystem (or mounting without root) Post: 302291518

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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Looking for a way to have a portable filesystem (or mounting without root) Post 302291518 by dkulchenko on Wednesday 25th of February 2009 11:52:58 PM

02-26-2009

Registered User

Looking for a way to have a portable filesystem (or mounting without root)

I have a free software project I'm working on that provides portable versions of Linux applications capable of being carried around on removable media, with settings and documents traveling along.

While developing the portable launcher, I fell into a problem: FAT32 partitions do not support symbolic links. This becomes a problem because 99% of Linux programs make use of symlinks for libraries, shared files, and whatnot. Therefore, I can solve the problem by duplicating directories where the symlinks would be, but this is extremely inefficient, and becomes a space problem on USB drives.

In my search for solutions, I thought of having a filesystem in a file that mounts into a temporary directory, from which the program then executes. The problem with this solution is that to mount a file, you require root privileges, and my target user base is users that will be using the apps on random computers, users that will not have root privileges on those computers.

My question is: Is it possible to have a read-write filesystem contained in a single file, and be able to mount it without root privileges? Maybe there is an alternative to mounting that accomplishes the same thing. Any ideas?

NOTE: Because of the situation, the users should not require root access on the host computers that they will be running apps on. It is safe to assume that they will have root access on the computers from which they will be downloading the apps from.

ANOTHER NOTE: I can't just use ext3 for the drive, because the portable apps will be for public use, and almost all removable media is either FAT or FAT32, neither of which support symlinks.

dkulchenko

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

copyfs-mount

COPYFS-MOUNT(1) 						   User Commands						   COPYFS-MOUNT(1)

NAME

       copyfs-mount - mounts a versioned file system

SYNOPSIS

       copyfs-mount version-directory mount-point

DESCRIPTION

       This  script lets you mount a CopyFS file system. version-directory is the directory where the files and version information will be stored
       by CopyFS.

       When using CopyFS for the first time, copyfs-mount will create the required files in the version-directory  before  running  copyfs-daemon.
       mount-point is the directory where the copyfs file system will be mounted. This is where the users will have access to the files.

       If you want to mount a CopyFS at '/mnt/fs', whose version directory is at /var/versions, you would use:

	    root@host# copyfs-mount /var/versions /mnt/fs

       To unmount it, simply do:

	    root@host# umount /mnt/fs

       As you would do for any other filesystem.

       You  can also allow an ordinary non-root users to mount and unmount CopyFS filesystems provided that the user is added to the 'fuse' group.
       Ordinary users will be able unmount the filesystem, using the fusermount command:

	    $ fusermount -u mount-point

AUTHORS

       CopyFS was created by Thomas Joubert and Nicolas Vigier <boklm@mars-attacks.org>

LINKS

       <http://n0x.org/copyfs/> CopyFS web site.

       <http://fuse.sourceforge.net/> FUSE - Filesystem in USErspace

SEE ALSO

       copyfs(1), copyfs-fversion(1), copyfs-daemon(1), fusermount(1)

copyfs-mount							     May 2008							   COPYFS-MOUNT(1)