PolicyKit confusion

[Da Rock]

On 12/24/11 03:31, Roland Smith wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 01:27:23AM +1000, Da Rock wrote:
>> couldn't give a shit about network drives. One scenario is network goes
>> down and I get a screenful of error messages- it annoys the shit out of
>> me, let alone scaring illiterate users.
> If the network goes down, network drives won't work. Your users will be
> sad/scared/frustrated with or without error messages, I'm guessing.
Nah. They'd flip out a whole lot more when the screen literally fills 
with error messages and keeps going. Frustrated they can handle and 
maybe complain, but that would make them run away... :)
>>> I don't think enough people care to make it really work under FreeBSD. I've
>>> certainly never missed it.
>> They don't care too much under linux either.... So many years, yet not a
>> single user doc anywhere on any of the f***ing monsters! Goddamn linux
>> devs- ever heard of KISS?! How about a user doc for something so bloody
>> confusing it takes a brain surgeon to figure it out?
> That's exactly why I've avoided using this stuff. :-)
Me too. I just made do with what was there.
>> Ahh, one more thing of note here: polkit-gnome-authorization would not
>> work under any circumstances (run as root or otherwise) to change
>> policies! WTF!
>>> You might take a look at devd(8) as a FreeBSD alternative, but I'm not sure if
>>> it notices new da devices popping up.
>> Oh, believe me I'd happily jump on it rather than deal with this mess.
>> But I can't find anything that will interact happily with the apps,
>> mount network shares of all kinds, and be exceedingly user friendly
>> (take note lin-devs: user-friendly != sys_admin-hell at least it
>> _doesn't have to_).
> Another way to go about it is to install e.g. ubuntu on a virtual machine and
> peek under the hood how it works there. But as you say it's probably tied into
> udev pretty tightly.
Tried that too, but each distro has there own "hack" to make it work for 
them. Crazy huh?
>> How forgiving is devd to a user pulling the plug to early? I did look
>> into it a bit, but it appeared nearly as difficult as deciphering the
>> above scenario- that said, having come through the other side of that
>> I'm not so sure my judgment was very accurate :) So now I might check
>> that fork out and see...
> Devd just gets some notifications and acts on them. There is a problem with
> mounted usb devices, but that is one of architecture, I guess. Devd only gets
> notified _after_ a device has been pulled. There is no way you can prevent
> data loss in all cases like that. On windows you're supposed to "prepare to
> eject" a USB device before pulling it out as well. The only "cure" is to mount
> a device syncronously, and disable _all_ write caching for those devices. If
> you try that you'll find that doing so has significant performance impact and
> not in a good way (disks are sloooow).
Almost need a "journaling" system for them. Any thoughts? What about 
setting up a temp folder (non-volatile buffer?) and a sync? Track 
devices using the uuid label?
>> God! What a mess... this belongs in the X-files: the truth _is_ out
>> there. But you might lose your head and many years of life just finding
>> the fragments!
> FreeBSD is on my personal desktop and laptop, but that seems to be the
> exception rather than the rule. Maybe you should write your experiences up and
> submit it to the freebsd-doc mailing list for inclusion in the official docs?
I may yet do that, but in the interim I'm going to get around to writing 
up my findings on a lot of different aspects of the systems in a wiki 
(I'll put up my findings on those as well...). Maybe my pain can help 
someone else :)

For reference _all_ my systems are FreeBSD: from laptops/desktops, 
HTPC's and servers. I'd like to be able to show a system better and more 
robust than the alternatives out there as well as easy on the users, and 
thats what I'm always working towards.
> And talking about mailing lists, maybe you should try your luck on the
> freebsd-gnome list?
> [http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-gnome]
I would but I'm not subscribed to that one (must be about the only one 
I'm not on :) ), and it hadn't come to mind as I wasn't using gnome! I'm 
using nautilus for testing as it has more features, but I'm intending on 
using pcmanfm or similar- lightweight, but usable.