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Re: USB mount with multiple users broken (hal and consolekit)



On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 18:14:07 +0200, Jussi Nurminen wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm having trouble with automounting of removable devices, when
> multiple users are logged in via GDM. This is with Debian Lenny.
> If I do tail -f /var/syslog, and then attach an USB stick, I get a
> message like this:
> 
> Nov 25 17:56:02 myws hald: mounted /dev/sde1 on behalf of uid 1000
> 
> which is nice. However, when I do this repeatedly with multiple users
> logged in, the UID keeps on changing randomly. Sometimes it's the UID
> who is logged of the active X session, sometimes not. Of course, this
> makes the USB stick unusable, unless you get happen to get lucky with
> the UID lottery.
> 
> Now, I thought consolekit was supposed to resolve this by letting hal
> know about the active session, but apparently it still does not work.
> Is everybody else having the same problem? It's a pain for our lab
> with multiple-user workstations.

I really do not understand the reason for complicating matters with this
automounting business. The user plugs in the USB stick, the system
indicates the presence of the (still unmounted) medium by putting an
additional icon on the desktop, the user clicks on the icon to mount the
device and open it in the file browser, the user does whatever he/she
wanted to with the files on the stick; when the user is done he/she
unmounts the device, e.g. via a right-click context menu associated with
the icon, the user unplugs the stick, the end. The whole process is
initiated by the user anyway by plugging in the USB stick, so why not
let the user trigger the mounting as well, so there will be no
ambiguities? If there are more users logged in then they all get an icon
in their respective desktop sessions and whoever is actually active and
clicks on the icon owns the device.

-- 
Regards,            | http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer
          Florian   |


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