[Hardy] Can't auto-mount my USB harddrives!

[Kaminix]

Binary package hint: kubuntu-desktop

I choose kubuntu-desktop as the package bugging because I'm not sure where the problem is. Anyway...

My two USB harddrives have worked in Gutsy and probably Gutsy -1 although I can't quite remember if I had them back then, think I did. Now in a fresh Hardy Heron Kubuntu install I get the following error message in Konqueror with both of them: (will attatch screenshot too)
A security policy in place prevents this sender from sending this message to this recipient, see message bus configuration file (rejected message had interface "org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume" member "Mount" error name "(unset)" destination "org.freedesktop.Hal")

As usual I will supply you with any information you might ask me for, just tell me how to extract it and I'll post it here in order to get this bug fixed.

Thank you

[Paul Dufresne (paulduf)]

Don't know if bug #216483 is a duplicate.
I wrongly thought bug #235134 was a duplicate, where I have given the following solution.

I was having an almost identical error when plugging a usb key, and finally did found that dbus policy was saying both one thing and then the opposite, commenting out the opposite fixed it for me:

More precisely in /etc/dbus-1/system.d/hal.conf it says:
  <!-- Allow anyone to invoke methods on the Manager and Device interfaces -->
  <policy context="default">
...
     <allow send_interface="org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume"/>

and later:
<!-- Default policy for the exported interfaces -->
  <policy context="default">
    <deny send_interface="org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.SystemPowerManagement"/>
    <deny send_interface="org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.VideoAdapterPM"/>
    <deny send_interface="org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.LaptopPanel"/>
    <deny send_interface="org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume"/>
    <deny send_interface="org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume.Crypto"/>
  </policy>
that I edited to become:
<!-- Default policy for the exported interfaces -->
  <policy context="default">
    <deny send_interface="org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.SystemPowerManagement"/>
    <deny send_interface="org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.VideoAdapterPM"/>
    <deny send_interface="org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.LaptopPanel"/>
    <!-- deny send_interface="org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume"/ -->
    <!-- deny send_interface="org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume.Crypto"/ -->
  </policy>

So I just commented out the last two deny lines (note the -- at the end too! )

It is unclear to me if latest hal in hardy-updates have still this problem.
Intrepid version (older!?) does not have this problem, because it allows it always.

[Izzy (izzy-qumran)]

It has. I just upgraded yesterday and ran into the same problem with 8.04.1 (so even the first "fix pack" does have this problem).

If I look closer on that file, it seems that somebody could not decide what policy to take - both times it is "context=default", and the only difference is that one block allows all and the other denies all - which makes absolutely no sense. I guess this somebody wanted to change the behavior from "allowing all to everybody" to "allow only to trusted users". So what you did by commenting out the two lines, would probably also have been achieved by changing the "policy user=0" into "policy group=users" in the last block :)

Strange though: It seems to work now for me - but there are no more icons put to the desktop. So if I insert some SD-card and copy data to it, I have to search the card later in order to safely remove it. Or does that get fixed after the next reboot/login? I only restarted the hal daemon up to now.

[Kaminix (kaminix)]

I haven't had the error in a while now, I don't know why.
I don't remember any hal update or something which made everything work; suddenly it just did.

[Fabien (fabien-ubuntu)]

Try that :
 sudo /var/lib/dpkg/info/dbus.postinst configure

then restart the computer

[dino99 (9d9)]

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/hal/