Hald-addon-storage won't run

[Dan Nicholson]

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 7:53 AM, Brown, Tony-P56943
<Anthony.Brown at gdc4s.com> wrote:
>
> We are building a custom linux system based upon redhat 5.1.   We are using
> halevt to send events whenever a user inserts/removes USB storage or
> CD/DVDs.  On our development systems, also based on redhat 5.1, this works
> great, but on our targets we get no events for USB or CD/DVD
> insertion/removal.  We have noticed that hald-addon-storage is not running,
> though it is available in /usr/libexec.  It runs on the development
> machines, however.
>
> We would like some information on how to debug this.
> We tried copying our /etc/dbus-1/* and /usr/share/hal/* configuration
> directories from the development machines to the target machines, but this
> didn't help.

On my fedora 11 system, this seems to be done in
/usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/20-storage-methods.fdi:

    <!-- poll drives with removable media -->
    <match key="storage.removable" bool="true">
      <append key="info.addons" type="strlist">hald-addon-storage</append>
    </match>

You can run lshal and check if it's in the info.addons string list.

udi = '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/storage_model_DVDRW_SHM_165H6S_0'
  access_control.file = '/dev/sr1'  (string)
  access_control.type = 'cdrom'  (string)
  block.device = '/dev/sr1'  (string)
  block.is_volume = false  (bool)
  block.major = 11  (0xb)  (int)
  block.minor = 1  (0x1)  (int)
  block.storage_device =
'/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/storage_model_DVDRW_SHM_165H6S_0'
(string)
  info.addons = {'hald-addon-storage'} (string list)
  ...

If that's setup correctly, check if hald-runner (which spawns the
addons) is running. Otherwise, you may want to look in syslog and see
if there's any info about hal. You can also try running hald
--daemon=no --verbose=yes to get more info.

--
Dan