ntfs USB HDD permissions

[David Zeuthen]

On Sat, 2006-04-08 at 23:06 +0300, George Billios wrote:
> The problem is gnome-mount.
> 
> This is the new kid on the block which is used in FC5 to mount/umount
> volumes and guess what....
> 
> It doesn't check at hal properties at all! The idea in the future
> (probably in 2010+ checking from the progress in gnome-mount cvs --
> hasn't been updated since 01/03/2006!) is that gnome-mount will take the
> extra parameters from gconf and you will be able to choose them also by
> right-clicking on a volume 

Something like this (work-in-progress)

 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gnome-mount-nautilus.png

just prettier and more functional. IIRC, SUSE got, in one of their
releases, a patch to KDE that does exactly this just in KDE.

> BUT for now you have no luck expect if you
> mount manually the volumes!
> 
> There is an open bug in fedora for this but... no response, no reply, no
> will to do something.

Right on the money, except for the fact that the reason no progress have
been made is that I've been busy with other stuff. And no one sent any
patches either for this :-)

Another reason is that it's fundamentally dangerous to just grant the
privilege of mounting ntfs (or hfs+) read-write with full access since
it will allow you to tamper with password files on those volumes and
effectively render the OS'es using those volumes insecure.

That's why we need stuff like PolicyKit -  here's some more
work-in-progress on that front.

 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/perm-override/gnome-mount-perm-override-1.png
 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/perm-override/gnome-mount-perm-override-2.png

So, to sum up, these things are intended to be solved, but it takes a
lot of time especially because I want to get it right the first time.

Hope this explains.

    David