udisks and eSATA: a question about the meaning of "detachable"

[David Zeuthen]

Hey,

On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 8:22 PM, Phillip Susi <psusi at cfl.rr.com> wrote:
> Why does one person who installs a DE on a server with a SAN with disks
> that are not managed by LVM ( the way most people do SANs ) trump the
> hundreds who expect their drives to just work when they plug them in?
>
> Heck, eliminate that point of contention then and instead of opening it
> up to all disks, just add sata to the whitelist.   That avoids the crazy
> desktop/server on a SAN issue.

I'll try to explain this to you one last time - this will be my last
mail in this thread.

First, GNOME works just fine as is - auto-mounting SATA drives will
not buy you anything. There really is no problem here, you are making
things up. Second, you don't appear to realize what a SAN is or how
easy it is to connect to one either on purpose or not. Just doing e.g.

 # iscsiadm --mode discoverydb --type sendtargets --portal
some-iscsi-server.corp.net --discover --login

is enough. Attaching a SAS or FC host adapter will usually have the
same effect. And in the future, UAS might be widely deployed so you
don't even _need_ SAS or FC fabrics - you just use the existing USB
plumbing. And then there's FCoE. And who the hell knows what is coming
up next?

So it's very easy to do this, hell, it's a DESIRABLE feature for a
system administrator to be able connect his local laptop (running
GNOME) to data-center networks and connect to individual LUNs in the
SAN. If we were to automount (or otherwise write to) every device then
we'd be causing DATA LOSS because there is NO WAY to tell if the LUN
is in use already.

Third, I'm still not making this up; in my employment here at Red Hat
I've dealt with partners and paying customers who complained about the
desktop automounter being trigger-happy and mounting LUNs from their
multi-million SANs. These guys just don't have the time or money to go
into some weird GNOME-specific registry (e.g. GConf or GSettings) or
some control panel or some weird /etc config file to turn off
automounting. They expect that the product works OUT OF THE BOX which,
surprisingly, includes not causing DATA LOSS just because you connect
to some LUN.

Good luck,
David