umounting usb, yet again.

afabco · Guru Joined: 24 Feb 2004 Posts: 380

Ok, the tension mounts, the frustration level is high, the sky is darkening, the apocalypse is nigh....

Still can't figure out this &*(^%^& user removable media thing.

I use the console. Not into these newfangled gee-yew-eye thingies.

plug in a usb stick. It mounts. Can read/write/delete all sorts of things you'd think you'd be able to do.

erik258 · Posted: Tue May 02, 2006 6:56 pm Post subject: your message and mine

you wonder

afabco · Guru Joined: 24 Feb 2004 Posts: 380

yeah, I could do that (I'd use 'users' rather than 'user'), but why should we have to? The whole point of this ivman/pmount stuff is to make it so we -don't- have to do anything in fstab. Or as root.

If we end up still having to still having to muck around in fstab just use removable media, then what's the whole point of ivman/pmount and why waste the time?

I'm not -even- going to get started on trying to do dvd-ram. What a fsckin mess. I got up and walked away on that one. Deal with it tomorrow. or next week. Or...
_________________
Anyone who puts a small gloss on a fundamental technology, calls it proprietary, and then tries to keep others from building on it, is a thief.
-Tim O'Reilly

erik258 · Posted: Tue May 02, 2006 7:30 pm Post subject: good point

good point.

yeah, removable media is kind of a pain. First of all, you have to physically put it in or attach it to the computer! Talk about old-school. then with all the adding to filesystem... I try to avoid non-wire transfers, partly because it's such a pain. Especially for me, because as you probably guessed i do lots by hand. Put in the thumbdrive; (re)discover the right modules. modprobe them. find the device file. mount it. then copy something. then unmount, change places, and do it all again ... and so much worse for discs, stupid WORM devices.

of course the utility of such things is undenyable, nor is it gonna dissapear. so maybe I should look into this stuff myself. course, it was a much bigger deal before I had highspeed. Ah, the internet the cause of --and solution to-- so many of life's computer-related (and not so computer-related) problems.
_________________
Configuring a Firewall? Try my iptables configuration
LinuxCommando.com is my blog for linux-related scraps and tidbits. Stop by for a visit!

afabco · Guru Joined: 24 Feb 2004 Posts: 380

Is that what's called 'sarcasm'? :wink:

_________________
Anyone who puts a small gloss on a fundamental technology, calls it proprietary, and then tries to keep others from building on it, is a thief.
-Tim O'Reilly

wuzzerd · Guru Joined: 05 Jan 2005 Posts: 467 Location: New Mexico

urcindalo · Posted: Wed May 03, 2006 2:32 pm Post subject:

Oops! I posted a new thread and didn't notice this was here.
Anyway, I reproduce here what I've posted in it, so any moderator is free to remove the other :roll:

Notice I say that I've been able to install a Gentoo box where the user can unmount in KDE the removable devices he plugs in through HAL+DBUS+UDEV. Unfortunately I don't know how to solve this issue for my own

----------

Thanks for reading this. I know this has been asked and answered a zillion times in these forums, but I'm really confused. I don't know either if this is the best forum to place this question.

Over the weekend I've installed Gentoo 2006.0 x86 on my brother's Pentium4. Everything was working fine, and under KDE 3.4.3 he was able to umount as user the devices he mounted. I set up his box with HAL + DBUS + UDEV.

The thing is that, with the same set up, I can't umount devices as a regular user in my AMD64 box (Gentoo installed more that a year ago and kept up-to-date on a daily basis). My fstab has no reference whatsoever to removable devices, and I can confirm they mount under /media with myname:users ownership when they are plugged in. However, if I try to umount them, I get a message from kio_media_mounthelper telling me /dev/hdc (for instance) is not in fstab and I'm not the root user.

I use:
* dbus 0.60-r4
* hal 0.5.5.1-r3
* udev 087

I tried downgrading udev to 079-r1, and also updating it to 090, to no avail.

I wonder if this has something to do with dates. Take a look at this sequence when inserting a USB pendrive:
1) Before inserting

urcindalo · Posted: Thu May 04, 2006 10:20 am Post subject:

Nobody knows how to solve this regular-user-can't-unmount issue?

afabco · Guru Joined: 24 Feb 2004 Posts: 380

regarding gnome-volume-manager and kde-volume-manager (etc), since I don't use them, I can't really provide a definitive answer as to how they do it. My guess is that they run as a user (or group) that is allowed to mount and umount, probably the user ivman, at a guess.

So since the user that actually mounts a device is, say, ivman, the user needed to umount is ivman.

Now, since the logged in user is in group 'plugdev' (per pmount's instructions), well, I would think that would allow the pmount and pumount to work, but apparently not.

So, to answer the question 'has the regular-user-can't-unmount been resolved', I have to say the answer is 'no, not without serious system compromise or ugly hack'.

I would be thrilled to be shown to be wrong.
_________________
Anyone who puts a small gloss on a fundamental technology, calls it proprietary, and then tries to keep others from building on it, is a thief.
-Tim O'Reilly

UberLord · Posted: Thu May 04, 2006 6:34 pm Post subject:

Try eject-2.1.4-r1
_________________
Use dhcpcd for all your automated network configuration needs
Use dhcpcd-ui (GTK+/Qt) as your System Tray Network tool

afabco · Guru Joined: 24 Feb 2004 Posts: 380

thomson@green ~ $ emerge -pv eject

These are the packages that I would merge, in order:

Calculating dependencies ...done!
[ebuild R ] sys-apps/eject-2.1.4-r1 +nls 0 kB

Total size of downloads: 0 kB

thomson@green ~ $ eject /media/LexarUSB/
Error: device /dev/sda was not mounted by you
eject: unmount of `/media/LexarUSB' failed

thomson@green ~ $ ls -ld /media/LexarUSB/
drwxrwx--- 8 ivman plugdev 4608 Dec 31 1969 /media/LexarUSB/

thomson@green ~ $ id
uid=1010(thomson) gid=1010(thomson) groups=4(adm),5(tty),10(wheel),14(uucp),18(audio),19(cdrom),35(games),80(cdrw),100(users),250(portage),501(mount),1001(pub),1010(thomson),1015(vmware),1016(plugdev),1018(webadmin),1200(scada)
_________________
Anyone who puts a small gloss on a fundamental technology, calls it proprietary, and then tries to keep others from building on it, is a thief.
-Tim O'Reilly

urcindalo · Posted: Fri May 05, 2006 3:24 pm Post subject:

coolsnowmen · Veteran Joined: 30 Jun 2004 Posts: 1479 Location: No.VA

urcindalo · Posted: Fri May 05, 2006 4:38 pm Post subject:

coolsnowmen · Veteran Joined: 30 Jun 2004 Posts: 1479 Location: No.VA

That may be true, but I am not the only person who couldnt get auto mounting to work in 3.4 and the simple upgrade worked. In my mind, its less hastle, (emerge and walk away)

afabco · Guru Joined: 24 Feb 2004 Posts: 380

ok. It works in kde. That's fantastic. Glad to hear it.

I don't use kde. I don't want to use kde.

I don't use gnome. I have no desire to use gnome.

I'm an old guy. A 'console curmudgeon'.

I do run fluxbox sometimes, mostly for firefox and multiple console windows.

How do I do it from a console?

So, to paraphrase monty python, "I'm noowt thrilled yeht".

_________________
Anyone who puts a small gloss on a fundamental technology, calls it proprietary, and then tries to keep others from building on it, is a thief.
-Tim O'Reilly

afabco · Guru Joined: 24 Feb 2004 Posts: 380

urcindalo · Posted: Fri May 05, 2006 5:08 pm Post subject:

coolsnowmen · Veteran Joined: 30 Jun 2004 Posts: 1479 Location: No.VA

afbco,
you can run the program ivman (/usr/bin/ivman) as a normal use (in the plugdev group)
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_ivman#Starting_Ivman_as_a_regular_user
then your ivman rules are located in ~/.ivman/

afabco · Guru Joined: 24 Feb 2004 Posts: 380

urcindalo:

Deepest apologies. Did not mean to sound rude, not at all. Was actually trying for a bit of levity in my frustration. Apparently didn't come across that way. This means I should probably keep my day job?

Also, now I understand what you were saying, and it bears looking into.

I also stumbled onto another thread about using autofs to do the mounting and umounting. I'm not sure how that would (or would not) fit in, but I'm going to explore that a bit.
_________________
Anyone who puts a small gloss on a fundamental technology, calls it proprietary, and then tries to keep others from building on it, is a thief.
-Tim O'Reilly

coolsnowmen · Veteran Joined: 30 Jun 2004 Posts: 1479 Location: No.VA

I've looked into autofs, AFAIK, it requires fstab entries to be quite defined which if you can do that, then ivman requires almost no configuration. To me, autofs is only good for the case where you know ahead of time exactly what device will be plugged in.
Autofs does seem usefull for say, only mounting /boot when you need it. But as far as the 'usb problem', hal based solutions are the only way to go.

urcindalo · Posted: Sat May 06, 2006 10:45 am Post subject:

jmedin · n00b Joined: 31 May 2006 Posts: 3 Location: Australia

On my system I noticed that if I click on the desktop icon as soon as it appears, I can unmount it by using right click and doing a "Safely Remove". If I don't click the icon, after a short wait, the device automatically mounts. If I then try to "Safely Remove" the device, I get the error.

What I suspect is that there is a file from a previous install that did not get cleaned up. I searched and found the file "/etc/dev.d/default/10-hal.dev", this file does not belong to any installed package. I deleted this file and this stoped the USB device from being automatically mounted.
_________________
Juan Medin

jmedin · n00b Joined: 31 May 2006 Posts: 3 Location: Australia

Ignore what I just said in the previous post. It's late and this problem has been bugging me for a while.

What you need to do is either, not have ivman running at all;

rc-update del ivman
/etc/init.d/ivman stop

Devices will not get auto mounted. You just need to click the icon on the desktop (if you have icon creation enabled) or go to media:/ in konqueror

If you want auto mounting, you need to leave ivman running but also start an instance of ivman for the logged in user as per the ivman man page.
_________________
Juan Medin

bec · Posted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 4:30 pm Post subject:

Thanks jmedin!

Running ivman as a service, and an instance for the logged user (simlinking /usr/bin/ivman to ~Desktop/Autostart) definitively solves all problems: the devices get automounted and can be safely removed!
_________________
abe