Flash drives now mount as root instead of user

[jonathan9]

What the HAL is going on?

I just love innocuous upgrades with unforeseen consequences.
I am running kubuntu hardy with up to date packages. This is on a "single user" notebook. I don't use any selinux stuff - at least not on purpose.

This worked fine (mounted thumb drives as user, not root) until a few days ago.

I just plugged in two different thumb drives and got locked out of
them. When I click on the desktop icon that appears after I plug the
drive in, konqueror (I don't have dolphin installed) tries to open them but fails with the following
message box:

A security policy in place prevents this sender from sending this
message to this recipient, see message bus configuration file (rejected
message had interface "org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume" member "mount"
error name "(unset)" destination "org.freedesktop.Hal")

Next, I su'd to root and created a /media/thumbdrive directory. I
chmod'ed it to 777. Then, I tried to chown it to my user.
The chown was ignored even though I was root!

Finally, I mounted the thumb drive (mount /dev/sdb1 /media/thumbdrive)
and copied my stuff to it as root from the command line. It's a fat32,
so permissions don't matter, at least in this case, but having to do
this was ridiculous.

I'm not "all thumbs", but I do need them!

Any ideas on fixing this so normal users can access thumb drives again?

I searched this site and found that:
1) pmount works from the command line
2) I added a group plugdev and added root and my user to it, but that didn't help
3) I took a look at /etc/dbus-1/system.d/hal.conf, but I have no idea what it does.
4) There are a lot of posts about this subject, but I can't sort them out - especially since this worked fine to start with for the last several releases of kubuntu.

Thanks.

Joe

[leftbas]

Re: Flash drives now mount as root instead of user

Permissions was my first guess, but you've already tried that. Maybe there's a group membership change that occurred in that upgrade. Otherwise, I'm just as stumped as you.

[jonathan9]

Re: Flash drives now mount as root instead of user

I went through a bunch of steps that I don't remember now and it works again. I have no idea what fixed it, but I'm having a similar problem with usb disk drives that I've got configured to mount fine from the user command line using either mount or pmount, but that won't mount from the icons that appear on the desktop when the drive is plugged in to the usb port *and* won't mount when I type
mount /dev/sdb2 /media/joelinusb2. (It will mount if I type mount /media/joelinusb2.) So there's some weirdness I don't understand.

[Snowhog]

Re: Flash drives now mount as root instead of user

These flash drives are formatted as vfat, yes? I'm guessing they are. Do you have entries for them in your /etc/fstab or no?