How to disable mounting of SATA / IDE drives?

[Jasper]

Reserved for my final comments.

For now:

Education. Education. Education.

Encryption. Encryption. Encryption.


What will you put on your flash stick(s)?
What could you put on your flash stick(s)?

Addendum

Yet again you know, but as always (l.e. three or four days) you profess discontent and yet again move the goal posts.

Why does it matter if a flash stick (or any partition it may have) auto-mounts when you can click and see confusing coloured dots (more commonly described as red crosses).

If you use (as previously mentioned) ram2sfs from Ted Dog, but fail to include a date file in the new iso - then you will not be able to use any normal Puppy method to save anywhere. You could also install Startmount from 01micko.

Addendum 2

Use encryption, whatever else you do could be easily circumvented be me (or anybody else with a little knowledge and half a brain).


Addendum 3

As a second rate solution try going to:
Menu>Desktop>Desktop drive icons manager
then untick the first box

Save the change to a multi-session CD (so that you can pointlessly remaster later with ram2sfs).

Addendum 4

Why not just disable the drives in BIOS when you allow anyone else to use your machine and re-enable them when you need them?

[marada2]

I know I could use encryption, but ideally I would like to have puppy not see the drives at all. I know this sounds paranoid but if puppy can see something, then a virus could be installed on non encrypted parts of the drive or could give a hacker the ability to start doing malicious things.

Then I thought as the internal drives are both SATA drives why don't I use an old puppy version that does not have support for SATA in the kernel. This topic came to my attention from someone who is unable to see SATA drives


http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 2&start=15

The problem is if I use a version with an old kernel will things like wifi card drivers still be supported? Also what about installing some newer software .pup packages. Will it have problems? Will I still be able to auto mount usb drives when they are plugged in?

[L18L]

Which version are you actually using

[marada2]

Which version are you actually using

precise puppy 5.7.1

[L18L]

Sorry,

I am not able to reproduce your problem.

I don't see anything automatically mounted.

[marada2]

Sorry L1 my very limited knowledge of linux has caused confusion on this. As mike said the internal SATA drives are not mounted, puppy is only showing what exists. What I am trying to achieve is to prevent access to the internal SATA drives. Ideally I would like puppy not to see these drives at all, but as Mike said it is not really feasable to prevent the kernel from seeing these. This then had me thinking, as they are SATA drives would it not be possible to rip out the sata drivers from the kernel? That way puppy would never see them. Obviously this is just theoretical and not something I would be cable of doing myself in a million years! As an alternative I am contemplating using an old puppy that does not have Sata support built into the kernel.

I also followed karl's suggestion which seems to prevent access to the internal SATA drives. The only problem is if I plug in a usb flash drive it not only gives access to this but also seems to reenable access to the internal SATA drives (which I don't want)

I hope you understand what I am trying to achieve now. Sorry if my post was not so clear but I know nothing about how linux works.

[L18L]

You can unmount all atadrives using this piece of

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. /etc/rc.d/PUPSTATE; while x=`mount | grep $ATADRIVES` ; do umount ${x%% *} ; done

You could run it periodically e.g. every 5 seconds launched by

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pschedule

That's all I can do for you.

[mikeb]

know this sounds paranoid but if puppy can see something, then a virus could be installed on non encrypted parts of the drive or could give a hacker the ability to start doing malicious things.

Who is actually going to have access ... shared house, family?.
Worry not about viruses coming via puppy.
To be honest if you have evil geeks floating around they will cause damage regardless.

NTFS could be disabled by hacking /bin/mount and commenting out the ntfs parts.... could be fun but basically anything ntfs is handled seperately...the drives would be seen but not mountable.

Your SATA blind kernel idea... only puppy that I can think of that might work for you is 4.12 retro..... wifi support was quite good and many extra drivers were built for it buried here in the forum..... suck it and see. Bear in mind intel sata might still work.
Recent ish software support and sounds like you just want the usual basics anyway.

Encrypting the drives used by other operating systems... is this a serious suggestion?

mike

[marada2]

Thanks for your suggestion L18L, I will definitely try this and see what happens. If I get no joy I will then try the 4.12 retro and see what happens.

With regards to Jaspers comment I don't want to disable the drives in the bios, as the bios is a bit temperamental and can have trouble recognizing a drive again.

Thanks Mike for your suggestion, it's interesting what you say about disabling NTFS. Maybe an easier way would be to use the Startmount program that Jasper mentioned as that seems to have an option to only mount linux drives - what do you think?

As for the evil geeks, yes I do have plenty. I have 4 teenage children!

[Karl Godt]

I would then recommend the Macpup derivate to you :
http://macpup.org/
http://macpup.org/earlier.php

That derivate uses the enlightenment windowmanager e17 , that does not show the drive icons on the desktop .

You should also look at the eventmanager GUI : Menu > System > Eventmanager , where you can reduce the displaying of the drive icons to a single icon , that clicking on it would launch pmount ( Menu > Filesystem > Pmount ) .
For pup_event_frontend_d : Disabling can be done for it also in the "Activate" Tab by unticking ' box for desktop hotplug support " .
Don't forget to restart X .

For the other things : Puppy by default does not automount . There are some derivates out here that automount . There are some script packages on the forum for automounting . Automounting gets requested occassionally here .

When pup_event_frontend_d does not run , no newly plugged drives would show on the desktop, but Pmount should still recognize most of the partitions .
To check for running pup_event : Use Htop for that, or

Code: Select all

ps | grep pup

in the shell console .
Further : Puppy does not recognize several filesystems by default like reiser4 , zfs or jfs .

[Sky Aisling]

marada2 writes:

I don't want a multisession CD. I just want build a puppy exactly the way I want it and then burn it to a CD. I don't plan on tweaking anything once I get things the way I want them. I am definitely not interested in multisession. The CD will purely be used as a security CD for internet banking, TOR and various encryption purposes. I definately don't want multisession or anything saved anywhere. The whole reason I am attracted to a live distro like puppy is the fact that I can boot it into ram and never have anything saved. This is an excellent security feature.

Hello marada2,

You write you will only use the Live CD to access bank account, TOR and various encryption purposes.
I'm no expert in Puppy, but, if that is all you are going to use it for, then your simple solution of using an older Pup that doesn't recognize SATA drives seems feasible.
Just because a Puppy is old doesn't mean it won't function well. Updated drivers can often be found on this forum. In some ways an older Pup might give you more security. Not many hackers are going to bother with 4.2.1, for example. lol!

Am I off base on this one, kennel mates?

Also, marada2 it would help if you posted the make, model and some basic specs about the machine you are using.

You write:

What I am trying to achieve is to prevent access to the internal SATA drives.

I understand your concern that code could be left on the SATA or IDE drives.

[Sylvander]

On my 2012 desktop hardware...
"lupu-5.2.8.6-20131004.iso" would boot OK if made into a frugal install on a Flash Drive...
[Wouldn't boot (in a SATA optical drive) if made into a "live" optical disk.]
But it WOULD NOT display on the Puppy desktop, icons for SATA drives [i.e. no display of internal HDD's or optical drives].
Due to certain drivers not included in the kernel.
See THIS POST where I say:
"c. There are no icons on the desktop for the partition-file-systems on my SATA->[internal HDD, or optical drive]."

This was fixed in "Lupusuper-5.2.8.6-20131012.iso".
You don't want to use the fixed version I guess.

[marada2]

Many thanks for this guys. I will definitely look into the old kernel idea and do a few experiments when I learn a little more about puppy. Many thanks

[Sky Aisling]

marada2
Another possible way to approach the situation is to get an external SATA drive.
Set up your Puppy on the external drive, access your banking sources, then unplug the external drive and lock it away in a drawer from the swarm of cyber nurds that live in your house.
That way you could continue to tweek and enjoy a Puppy.

[rufwoof]

Rename /bin/mount to something else and write a script /bin/mount that tests whether the request is valid (USB) or not (ATA) and calls the renamed mount if OK or pupmessage's a reply if not.

Easily circumvented - but a deterrent.