More trouble with automounting using hald in Gnome2-2.18.0

[Dr. Gary E. RAFE]

>On Fri, 2007-04-06 at 11:40 -0400, Dr. Gary E. RAFE wrote:
>> I have a client who has a Toshiba notebook running
>> 6.2-R and Gnome 2.16.1_2 from packages.
>>
>> So far, her experience has been somewhat aggravating:
>>
>> [1] The combination of hald/dbus/policykit would work
>>     once or twice to automount a data CD or USB flash
>>     drive, but would soon stop, complaining about
>>     lack of permissions by the user, particularly when
>>     trying to unmount the device.
>
>Should be fixed in the latest version of HAL.

I was able to get the notebook from my client for a few days
and went at it yesterday, with the goal of getting the combination
of dbus/polkitd/hald to "just work" from the Gnome desktop.

Most of the upgraded packages for gnome2-2.18.0 came from Tinderbox;
some from other ftp.freebsd.org sites.
The relevant packages here are:

dbus-1.0.2_1
policykit-0.1.20060514_3
hal-0.5.8.20070324
nautilus-2.18.0.1_1

With this combination, I had various levels of success
with data CDs & USB Flash drives
(e.g., the would all mount/umount/eject except for
occasional errors & warnings that were not very
helpful).

For example, "Ejecting" a data CD from the File Browser
returns an ERROR Message Window:
Cannot unmount volume
You are not privileged to unmount the volume 'CDVolName'.
Details:
Volume mounted by uid UNKNOWN cannot be
unmounted by uid 1002.

After dismissing the window, the desktop icon removes,
the CD tray opens, and the mount is gone,
but the mount point still in /media/CDVolName;
Subsequent use of that CD adds an '-' to the volume name
mount point in /media/.

Then there's the (apparently random) ERROR window:
	Cannot eject volume

when the CD tray is opened.
Apparently harmless, but annoying.

After looking for patterns & thinking that this might
be "good enough" for my (understanding) client,
I reboot the notebook to verify that it would behave
after rebooting...

At which point, the system stopped recognizing USB flash
drives (except for ONE insertion out of 10),
and complaining during data CD mounts (see above) !

At that point, I killed hald & restarted it to log;
about 10 minutes worth (minus ACPI messages) of testing
are posted here:
	http://drgerlists.googlepages.com/hald_log-20070409a.txt

I noticed when a USB flash drive was connected,
"ps ax | grep hald" reported the process
	hald_addon_storage /dev/probe0
while the hald log reports:
	hf-block.c:49: unable to stat /dev/probe0: No such file or directory

So, where did /dev/probe0 go ?

Is something important missing from the kernel ?

Does devfs need to be configured in some special way ?

At this point, I'll be happy to get automounting
working like it did earlier in the day
(*without* re-installing the entire package directory).

One last question for now:
Can I keep dbus/polkitd/hald (so Gnome is happy),
but turn *off* the handling of removable media
(like USB flash, data & audio CDs, etc.) ?
I have a work-around that uses devd to handle USB flash
automounting, but don't want it conflicting with
what hald provides.
--
Dr Gary E RAFE: drgerlists at gmail dot com