On Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 09:29:09AM +0100, kpb wrote:
> On Tue, 28 Jul 2015 00:09:45 -0400
> Steve Litt <slitt@???> wrote:
>
> > Cheer up Svante. This isn't for your corporation's web servers, it's
> > for the guy with a desktop, the system's only user, a guy who already
> > has root but just doesn't want to do su all the time, who just wants
> > automounting to happen.
> >
>
> That guy would be me.
>
> I think that xfce4 with automounting enabled will cover most of us desktop/laptop users as a (suggested) default. xfce4 works with 2d or even VESA video and so can work on older machines.

Over the years the state of mounting USB drives has steadily
deteriorated on my Debian Jessie laptop.

I have done regular upgrades, have dumped gnome3 and KDE4, have removed
systemd, but mostly it has been the regular updates that seem to have
made things worse. Perhaps the Debian developers have managed to
wrangle systemd into a form that would have worked better recently,
but if so I have no knowledge of it. I have my doubts.

I now use xfce.

Automounting has never been satisfactory, but the the ability to mount
has gone from bad to worse, auto or not.

Once, it would automount, but as the wrong user. I would have to
become root and unmount it, then mount it as myself.

Once, an icon for the device would appear on my screen that I
could click to mount.

Later, I wowld have to open the file manager to get the icon on which I
could open a menu that allowed me to mount. But the system would think
of a place to mount it and add it to /dev. Great if I wanted to go on
using the file manager to manipulate it. Not so great of I had to
guess the mount point.

Later, I was told I did not have the privileges needed to do
the mount, but it would let me mount it anyway if I entered the root
password.

Nowadays, it won't even let me enter the root password to identify
myself as privileged.

I can only mount by opening a terminal, becoming root, and typing in a
mount command. Of course I have to guess whether the device has
been plugged in as /dev/sdb, or /dev/sde, or whatever. In case of
(frequent) doubt, I switch to a root console with control-alt-F1 and a
login, unplug the device, and plug it in again. It will the tell me
after a while, that a new device has been inserted, and tell me what
/dev/sd* name it has dynamically installed. I end up, as root,
mounting the device with root as the owner. It's usually a USB stick
with one of the ubiquitous Microsoft file systems used on USB sticks,
and all the files can be read or writen by root only.

Now I also use the sshfs file system on my laptop, to access most of my
files, which are kept on a server at home. I mount it as myself.
Then the ssh file systtem won't allow anyone other than me to read
or write it.

In particular, I can't execute cp from the usb stick to my home server,
either as myself or as root. I end up cp'ing it to my laptop as
root, chown'ing it to be mine as root, and then copyying it to the
server as myself. Woe be to me if the laptop doesn't have enough
temporary disk space.

Of course, I suppose I could establish a second sshfs connection as
root, but I really think it's getting too complicated by now.

Now I realize that there are circumstances where all this is necessary
for security reasons. But when it's my laptop and a USB stick my
friend (one of them who uses Windows, another uses Mac, by the way)
hands to me,
it is
crazy that I can just stick the thing into almost anybody's
machine in the coffee shop and they can read and write it, but not my
Jessie laptop.

Now I don't need automounting. But I do need to be able to read and
write ordinary unencrypted USB sticks withoug haveing to become root
and guess a device names, and then still have trouble.

Please make this easier. My friends see me struggling with this and
thank God they are not using Linux. Poor PR, if nothing else.
I get asked why I use Linux if it gives me such trouble.

-- hendrik