I am afraid that what you want to do cannot be done:
* access control at physical partition/disk level cannot be done.
  Maybe in newest NTFS versions, but that is not a Linux realm
* you could control access to disk at BIOS boot time by setting HDD
password, though I suspect that it is not quite what you want.

You can control access via:
* user/groups at mount point for physical partitions/drives
* encryption keys at block level on mount time - this can be done for
partitions as well as storage containers (encrypted file containig file
system such as home dir)
* user/groups and/or netgroups at access level to a networked storage
such as SMB/CIFS or NFS+Kerberos

Alternatively you could use Virtual Machines to achieve the
disk/partition isolation.

Please feel free to correct me, if I forgot/omitted some new/old way of
controlling block access storage.

Good luck, Tomas

On Wed, 2016-11-09 at 09:48 -0600, Richard Owlett wrote:
> On 11/7/2016 6:20 AM, Richard Owlett wrote:
> > 
> > My primary use case is a laptop:
> >     1. purchased explicitly for use as a test bed.
> >     2. whose HD has been erased multiple times in ONE day.
> >     3. is isolated from ANY network.
> >     4. has multiple installs of Debian, primarily classed as:
> >        a. a full GUI install - what one would get choosing all
> >           installer defaults.
> >        b. a GUI install limited to the tools I use routinely.
> >        c. an install oriented to whatever my current experiment
> > needs.
> >     5. has 2 classes of "DATA Partitions":
> >        a. those which UID 1000 may mount without entering any
> >           password.
> >        b. those which *ANY* user may mount only by using root
> >           password.
> > [deleting paragraph which "muddied" the waters ;]
> 
> Consider a machine with a single hard drive with vast unused 
> space on it.
> I wish to create two classes of partitions:
>     One class would require root privileges &/or appropriate 
> fstab entry to mount.
>         [i.e. current default behavior]
>     A new "thingy" [explicitly avoiding calling it a partition ;]
> 
> This "thingy" would have metadata within itself identifying who:
>     1.  may *NOT* mount it at all.
>     2.  mount it *READ ONLY*
>     3.  may mount it read/write with access determined by 
> individual file permissions.
> 
> I'm beginning to suspect a variation of LVM might be relevant. 
> Haven't found appropriate docs yet.
> 
> I'm doing some experiments with USB flash drives that show 
> potential for illustrating effects I desire. They are *EXPLICITLY 
> UNSUITABLE* for my application as they are removable devices!
> 
> Any clearer than my first try?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> PLUG mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
_______________________________________________
PLUG mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug

Reply via email to