[Techtalk] udev, how do I loathe thee...help please!

[Wim De Smet]

Hi,

On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 6:01 PM, Akkana Peck <akkana at shallowsky.com> wrote:
> Carla Schroder writes:
>> On Sunday 07 November 2010 09:08:51 pm Akkana Peck wrote:
>> > Note that gnome, hal, udisks and a bevy of other daemons and services
>> > are supposed to handle all this for you and automount the card.
>>
>> It does automount it-- in /media/[cardname], owned by root. FAT32 is no good
>> for files over 3.9 GB, and I would rather use a real filesystem anyway. So I
>> use ext2.
>>
>> According to man udev you can set permissions in udev rules, and the lords of
>> udev have been nattering at us for years that is the True and Correct Way,
>
> You can set permissions in udev rules, but that will only set the
> permissions for the block device, /dev/sdc1 or whatever. You don't
> care about that because /bin/mount is going to be run as root anyway.
>
> What you care about is the filesystem after it's mounted, and
> where it's mounted, not the block device it came from.
> For that, you need to be configuring whatever is automounting it
> (probably hal, but possibly udisks or something else, depending
> on distro and desktop), not udev. Presumably there's a way to tell
> those daemons to mount somewhere other than /media, but I bet it
> won't be related to udev rules.

I still have hal installed but it doesn't seem to do much anymore. If
what I read a while ago is correct, it's actually nautilus doing the
mounting now. The ubuntu help page seems to back me up:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Mount/USB
(I'm guessing Carla has a somewhat recent ubuntu)

As to setting a mount point in your home dir, I think you'll have to
disable nautilus automounting and use something else that can do it (I
guess any daemon that integrates with udisks or udev directly and lets
you choose mount points). You used to be able to set some hal options,
but that's gone now:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/devicekit-disks/+bug/423058

<rant>
It's funny how gnome devs have this tendency to replace one rube
goldberg machine by another, but with less functionality. And then
fail to document it. And leave all the old command line switches and
config files in, but have them not do anything.
</rant>

The easiest solution would be just accepting gnome's straitjacket and
relabeling the drive/partition so at least it always mounts in the
same place.

cheers,
Wim