GNOME 2.28 automount permissions problem

Secant · 05-07-2010, 09:31 PM

I'm having a few problems getting automounting working after upgrading from GNOME 2.26 to GNOME 2.28. AFAIK automounting used to use HAL and it is now done though policykit. The problem is that the permissions set by policykit are wrong when I automount a USB flash drive. I can't create or delete files/directories on the drive, even though my user is set as the owner and the permissions appear to be set by default to 0700.

At first, automounting didn't work at all. I then modified the file /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.devicekit.disks.policy which allowed the drive to be automounted. But, I can't modify the contents of the drive even though I have the appropriate permissions. The exact error I get when trying to create a file is:

Code:

Error while creating file new file.
There was an error creating the directory in /media/rally2.
Error opening file '/media/rally2/new file': Permission denied

Even if I become root, the problem persists: I can't modify the contents of the drive.

Does anybody know what's going on here?

EDIT:
I am ~amd64, but have unmasked sys-fs/udev (now at 151-r4) specifically to get automounting working.

i92guboj · 05-10-2010, 02:07 AM

If root can't do a thing either then the problem is at a lower level, and not with permissions.

Is it an NTFS volume? If so, your problem is most likely that gnome is using ntfs instead of ntfs-3g to mount it. The regular ntfs driver has very limited support for writing files, and by default it only mounts volumes in read-only mode. I've had a similar problem in the past, what I usually do is to remove the ntfs support from my kernel, then I install ntfs3g and create a file called /etc/udev/rules.d/99-ntfs3g.rules with this contents:

Code:

ENV{ID_FS_TYPE}=="ntfs", ENV{ID_FS_TYPE}="ntfs-3g"

This allows automounting of ntfs volumes for me.

Some days ago, however, the ebuild for ntfs3g-2010.3.6 got a new udev use flag, so you might want to enable that flag and try that version of ntfs3g before. It might work out of the box that way without creating the fules by hand. Haven't tested it.

Secant · 05-10-2010, 11:21 PM

Thanks for the reply, it is an ntfs volume and as I've had issues with ntfs/ntfs-3g before I think you've hit the nail on the head.

When I next switch back to GNOME I'll try your solution and post the results.

Secant · 05-25-2010, 11:57 AM

Right, that's done it. I unmasked the latest version of `sys-fs/ntfs3g' and recompiled it with the `udev' USE flag, stopped hald, and now everything works perfectly.

I had to stop hald, otherwise I got a "resource not available" error message when hal tried to mount it while PK was mounting it.

Thanks!