[TriLUG] non-root partial view of file?

[Aaron Joyner]

Other options include
1) use sudo to allow the mounting of the loopback device at a specific
path, or under a specific path (more flexible == less secure, you get to
pick where the slider goes).  The rest should work fine w/o root.
2) running a VM, and using the VM software to mount the image, then
operating on the image inside the VM.
3) In theory 'namespaces', specifically 'mount namespaces' (possibly also
require you create a 'uid namespace' so you can be uid 0 in your uid
namespace) should allow you to do this in simple unprivileged userspace, if
you have kernel support and all the tools in place.

Further reading:
http://lwn.net/Articles/531114/
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-mount-namespaces/index.html

Aaron S. Joyner


On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 11:56 PM, Alan Porter <porter at trilug.org> wrote:

>
> You need "fakeroot". It's a shell that lets you lie to it about file
> ownerships and permissions, and it repeats your lies back to you later.
> It's surprisingly useful for building images. I used it at "the oven place"
> (TMIO) for making filesystem images as an unprivileged user.
>
> - alan
>
>
>
> > If I were so inclined, I /could/ write a string of 0's and 1's to a
> file, which just so happened to match the output of creating a disk image
> through more conventional tools.
>
>
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