Sick and tired of Gnome automount issues

Message

haarp · Post by **haarp** » Thu Dec 18, 2008 6:34 pm

Greetings.

This has been going on for a year or so now and started after a major Gnome update session. Others had similiar problems, but nothing really ever fixed it.
What is it? It's Gnome's automount that is COMPLETELY f*cked up.

Plugging in an USB stick:
- It gets mounted, and with any luck you will be greeted by a new Nautilus windows showing the contents. It will never be visible on the Desktop. With a bit of luck, it will appear under "Places" in a few hours or so.
- Nautilus offers you NO options to unmount it. Not in the file menu, not when right-clicking on the mounted-in folder. Try to unmount manually with umount /mnt/disk-1 ? Sucks for you: "/sbin/umount.hal: disk-1 is not recognized by hal"
[s]Well, use the proper umount then: /bin/umount /mnt/disk-1. That actually works and HAL notices it. GOD FORBID you unmount it from the root account! HAL does not notice that, .hal-mtab will get screwed up and it fails to remove the folder it created.[/s]
edit: looks like both are the same replaced umount commands. It takes a while until HAL "recognizes" your device. Probably the same while it takes to get it to show up under 'Places'

Having bind-mounts somewhere on your filesystem:
- Yeh, of course, you see THOSE on the Desktop. That's just what I needed! Useless clutter with no way to remove it! But under no circumstances will it show any actually useful icon for the USB stick.

Leaving the USB stick plugged in after unmountig it:
- After a few hours it will decide to mount it again. Just like that.

Internal drives show up under 'Places':
- Clicking on them will mount them and put them under .hal-mtab, but fails to register them with HAL

The are a number of threads about this already in the Gentoo Forums with a plethora of hints at how to fix this, none working. That's why I'm trying to address the whole problem in this thread here right now.

The following bugs should be fixed (by upstream):
- Integrate unmount command into Nautilus
- Fix the useless umount.hal command that takes over the old umount
- Make HAL notice when root unmounts something and update .hal-mtab accordingly and remove the old empty dir under /mnt or /media
- Show mounted devices on the Desktop
- Instantly show them under 'Places' aswell
- Do NOT show bind-mounts on the Desktop
- Don't mount previously-unmounted devices
- Fix HAL in the case of manually mounting the drive

Clad in Sky · Post by **Clad in Sky** » Fri Dec 19, 2008 2:47 pm

That sounds _really_ annoyed.
I can understand that, I was, too.
But somehow I got it fixed.
Maybe you should consider changing to xfce. Looks gnomey but seems to work without issues.

jonnevers · Post by **jonnevers** » Fri Dec 19, 2008 3:06 pm

i haven't really experienced much of what you're saying but since i reinstalled i haven't really done much with removable media. i should see whats up with various types of media on a fresh ~amd64 gnome (2.24).

the one thing that gets me and i think you're mention this as two issues, i want removable media (usb drivers, cd/dvds) to show up on the desktop but i don't want ssh mounts to have icons on the desktop.

to me, these are two different types of things but nautilus treats them the same and exposes just a single option to display on desktop or not display on desktop that acts on both.

haarp · Post by **haarp** » Mon Dec 22, 2008 9:32 pm

Yup, that's probably true. I am quite pissed at Gnome. And no, I'm not going to use xfce because of this

It works for you guys? What are your useflags on the gnome-packages? What hardware/gnome related daemons and services are you running?

haarp · Post by **haarp** » Sat Jan 03, 2009 8:26 pm

Abraxas · Post by **Abraxas** » Sat Jan 03, 2009 10:01 pm

haarp wrote:Yup, that's probably true. I am quite pissed at Gnome. And no, I'm not going to use xfce because of this

It works for you guys? What are your useflags on the gnome-packages? What hardware/gnome related daemons and services are you running?

Automounting removable media is foobarred for me too. You're not the only one.

Clad in Sky · Post by **Clad in Sky** » Sun Jan 04, 2009 9:38 am

USE Flags (for your reading enjoyment):

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As for the netmounts: I don't know WHAT to do exactly, but there are the files
/usr/share/hal/fdi/preprobe/10osvendor/10-ide-drives.fdi
/root/99-redhat-storage-policy-fixed-drives.fdi
in which you're supposed to change that behaviour. I found that somewhere here on this forum because I didn't want a mount to show up on the desktop, but I do not remember what to change in the files.

straightlineapple · Post by **straightlineapple** » Tue Jan 06, 2009 5:43 pm

Hi,
I am having the same kind of problem here with gnome 2.22 on amd64. Some of the issues:

[*] DVDs won't mount automatically
[*] USB won't mount automatically
[*] If something is on the cd drive when the computer starts, it won't get mounted either
[*] Mounting things with the Disk Mounter doesn't make them appear on the desktop
[*] Nautilus can't mount anything when one clicks over its icon on "Computer"

It would be nice if someone posted here all the partial solutions that have been proposed so far on other topics, it would really help a lot!

Thanks

gemini91 · Post by **gemini91** » Wed Jan 07, 2009 2:04 pm

usb memory sticks mount fine, and umount OK. dvd's and cd's also mount
and unmount with out any problems. I run ~amd64, Gnome-2.24.2 and
hal is :

Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild R ] sys-apps/hal-0.5.11-r6 USE="X acpi laptop -apm -crypt -debug -dell -disk-partition -doc (-selinux)" 0 kB

The only thing I know that is different is that I prefer to have the other partitions on my machine mount
automatically, and apparently that is not how hal works. So I delete the following file to make that happen.

/usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/99-storage-policy-fixed-drives.fdi

Apparently that does not work for everyone, but after every hal update I delete it and my partitions mount.

haarp · Post by **haarp** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 3:09 am

Heh. Tried updating Gnome to no avail.

Automount even interferes with Gparted. Everytime it does something, the drives get reinitialized and the automounter starts mounting all the internal and external things he can get his ugly hands on... It is impossible to use gparted in this state, except when disabling HAL completely (which gparted depends upon or it won't start!)

haarp · Post by **haarp** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 4:09 am

Major breakthrough!

No fancy hal-rule-editing was necessary. I have gnome-volume-manager -with- the automount useflag installed.
I long had a symlink from /media pointing to /mnt, cause I didn't accept the fact that someone was to decide where I mount my stuff. I finally gave up on that and made /media an extra folder. The results are impressive:

- Nautilus recognizes drives instantly and correctly
- Nautilus offers an 'unmount' option
- The drive shows up on the desktop
- hal.mtab gets updated properly and the folder gets removed when it is no longer needed

As for removable drives like floppies or cdroms: Remove their /etc/fstab entries. Then they will integrate with Nautilus and HAL and work properly, show unmount buttons, etc.
So I guess the whole thing was my fault all along.

These problems remain:
- bind/ssh-mounts and a few others remain on the Desktop, although unneeded and they can't be removed individually. -> Get rid of them
- Don't mount EVERYthing you can get your hands on and that is not in the fstab!
- I would like persistent mounts in the fstab to be recognized and more nicely integrated into Gnome
I haven't tested how HAL/Gnome handles manual unmounting by root yet.

Clad in Sky · Post by **Clad in Sky** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 6:39 am

Congratulations!

haarp wrote:So I guess the whole thing was my fault all along.

No! It all worked fine (I assume) before you upgraded Gnome. So they screwed up, not you. It's that tedious tendency of the Gnome devs to reinvent the wheel or make things "easier".

For your those unneeded things on the desktop you should have a look around the fora. I vaguely remember a post that dealt with this. You had to edit one of these fdi-policy thingies.
Take a look: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-69 ... ight-.html

timeBandit · Post by **timeBandit** » Wed Jan 21, 2009 4:53 pm

Clad in Sky wrote:For your those unneeded things on the desktop you should have a look around the fora. I vaguely remember a post that dealt with this. You had to edit one of these fdi-policy thingies.
Take a look: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-69 ... ight-.html

Before following any recommendations to edit FDI policy files under /usr/share/hal, [topic=729551]read this[/topic].

letrec_ · Post by **letrec_** » Mon Jul 06, 2009 12:41 am

Is there a solution for the Gnome hal automount issue? I am experiencing similar problems on amd64 after an upgrade to GNOME 2.24.3 with hal-0.5.11