Thoughts about HAL, Ivman and Pmount.

[Jonatan Liljedahl]

On Thu, 27 Oct 2005 15:17:56 -0700
Artem Kachitchkine <Artem.Kachitchkin at Sun.COM> wrote:

> > How do you mean external? But if automounting is done on system
> > level(not user session), for example by ivman running as
> > ivman.plugdev, shouldn't ivman set the correct ownership (like
> > "ivman.plugdev" and then let all users who should be able to access
> > and unmount media be part of the "plugdev" group)
> 
> A device must belong to somebody. It should probably belong to root by
> default. Root can take permanent ownership of the device and mount it
> so it's accessible to all. There's nothing preventing you from running
> root's instance of a volume manager outside any root session.

I know, that's what I do. But some say it's bad, becouse maybe the
device shouldn't be accessible to all, or unmountable by all.
Personally, I'm not sure what's the right thing. I lend towards no
automounting at all, just create mountpoints. first user who mounts
something will own it and only he can unmount it.

> > It doesn't work if all users log into the box trough X terminals.
> > (the console isn't used by any user)
> 
> It all comes down to the question of device ownership. Unfortunately, 
> there isn't a universal algorithm to associate X terminals with
> devices( although there are heuristics, but they don't work for
> everyone). So the sysadmin needs to associate devices with users
> through another policy, such as multiseat.conf.

Yes, that multiseat.conf thing seems to be good. Too bad I don't run
gnome so I can't use gnome-volume-manager...

> It's true that
> currently HAL and volume managers are not particularly
> multiuser-friendly, and it's a problem. But the problem can't be
> solved entirely within HAL.

Of course, I'm sorry if anyone thinks I'm here to complain about hal. ;)
I just want to figure out how to set things up...

> >>This should be
> >>fixed by a mufy ownership policy and a mufy volume manager. I'm
> >>working on a HAL extension to make this easier to implement, but
> >>that's just one piece of the puzzle.
> > 
> > Sounds interesting, would you like to tell more about this?
> 
> Sure, see:
> 
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2005-July/002714.html
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2005-August/002941.html
> http://blogs.sun.com/roller/resources/misha/hald_arch.html

I'll take a look.

> > But maybe I should get a better volume manager instead?
> 
> I was alluding to that :)

Is there some list of volume managers out there?

/Jonatan    -=( http://kymatica.com )=-