[Discuss] ln -s will no longer link to USB mounted on /media/<USB-Drive> by Dolphin

[Murray Strome]

----- Original Message -----
From: Steven Kurylo <sk at infinitepigeons.org>
Date: Tuesday, October 27, 2009 20:32
Subject: Re: [Discuss] ln -s will no longer link to USB mounted on /media/<USB-Drive> by Dolphin
To: discuss at vlug.org

> The symlink in my home directory does NOT change any 
> permissions. It is just that if I use "sudo mount" to mount the  
> vfat USB drive in my home directory, the system sets the owner 
> to root, and the owner is the only one who can write to it.  
> However, if I mount the device using Dolphin, it creates a mount 
> point in /media and mounts the device there, but the owner is 
> set to me, the user, and the group is root.  The result is that 
> I can then write to the file.
> >
> > Yes, it definitely did work yesterday by using the ln -s 
> commmand to create a directory linked to the mount point in 
> /media. What happened to cause it to no longer work today is a 
> complete mystery to me.
> 
> I think the difference is yesterday you mounted with dolphin, which
> would mount the share with your user.  When you mount it as 
> root, then
> only root will be able to access it.

Yes, I realize that.  That is why I wanted to link to the point in /media from my home directory. That did work well yesterday, but it wouldn't do so today until I just rebooted again now. I mounted the drive with Dolphin, and used ln -s to create a directory in my home directory, and it worked!



> Since dolphin can mount the drive, I would then assume you could drop
> the sudo from the mount command.

No, I cannot drop the sudo from the mount command. It gives a message saying "only root can do that".

> Is this drive listed in fstab?

No, it is not in fstab. However, it IS in mtab:

/dev/sdb1 /media/KINGSTON vfat rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal,uid=1000,utf8,shortname=mixed 0 0

> 
> Or perhaps dolphin is doing something with fuse...

Perhaps, or possibly hal (about which I am totally ignorant)

I don't know if it is related or not, but I noticed that on about three occasions over the past couple of days, the "Kickoff Application Launcher" stopped working. I had to go to a terminal and do "sudo reboot" to get the computer to restart, after which point the KAL worked again.

The only other thing I can think of is that at one point, I installed usbmount.  I then removed it as it didn't seem to help me. However, I had rebooted a few times after removing it.  The only other significant system change I had tried over the past couple of days was to try to install ubuntuone.  That did not work. However, the timing doesn't seem at all related to the ln -s failing to link to the /media point.

The other possibility is that I have mounted various other USB drives betwwen the time it worked and the time it failed.  I guess I will have to do some more experimenting!

Murray