Re: concurrent X users and gnome-volume-manager
Received Sun 19 Dec 2004 5:37am +1100 from Sven Luther:
> On Sat, Dec 18, 2004 at 05:35:06PM +0100, Sjoerd Simons wrote:
> > On Sat, Dec 18, 2004 at 05:32:26PM +0100, Sven Luther wrote:
> > > On Sat, Dec 18, 2004 at 03:56:42PM +0000, Sam J wrote:
> > > > Marcelo E. Magallon wrote:
> > > > >On Sat, Dec 18, 2004 at 07:03:22AM +1100, Graham Williams wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > > At any time on one machine (home machines running Debian unstable) I
> > > > > > allow multiple users to have their X sessions running concurrently
> > > > > > (e.g., on tty7, tty8, etc). I've not yet figured out how to get
> > > > > > gnome-volume-manager working happily in this situation.
> > > > > My initial reaction is "sorry, you loose".
> > > > Could g-v-m be configured to use the "users" option instead of "user"?
> > > > According to mount(8), it should allow any user to unmount the device
> > > > regardless of who mounted it.
> > > yes, but this alone will not do. you also need to make the files available, so
> > > a group and the right gid options would be best in this circunstance.
> > Please first define the behaviour you would like to see, before going into
> > implementation details.. Do you want everyone to be able to umount all
> > removable devices under all circumstances ? Or just in some cases or...
[...]
> Still, i understand that this is a maybe non-solveable usability issue. Let's
> go into this in detail, as you asked.
>
> 1) There is one physical machine, where stuff can be plugged into.
>
> 2) This machine usually has only one user holding the console, so this user
> is used by pmount, and everything works fine.
I guess the "first" running g-v-m that notices the new device gets to
assign its owner to the mounted device? (Each user may be running
g-v-m and I'm guessing one of them notices the new device first?)
> 3) In the case at hand, there are two X server running on the same machine
> and the same console. They are not active at the same time, and it would
> stand to reason that the expected behaviour would be for the user whose
> session is actually active to mount the stuff. I don't know if this is
> easily available as info though, but once you know this, the rest becomes
> easy.
Yes, if we could determine which of multiple X servers running on the
current console was the active one when the device is plugged in that
would be a start toward the solution. Another option is to open the
device up to everyone in group plugdev through fstab (as below) but
that is less than ideal:
/dev/usbkey /media/usbkey auto users,gid=plugdev,umask=0002,defaults 0 0
> Remaining problem is what to do about a plugged in USB stick, once you
> switch over to the other console. One solution would be a console user
> group, but again this poses security problems, altough rather limited ones.
Would not the use of the "users" option in mount be a help to the
solution here? The second user here just unmounts the device
originally mounted by the first user's g-v-m, then mounts (e.g.,
unplug then plugs it back in) to get their g-v-m mounting it for
them. Of course, the unmount won't work if the first user still has
the device open somewhere, but I suppose that is a management issue
left up to the users sharing the console!
Thanks for the insights.
Regards,
Graham
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