Hal does not recognize my partitions.

[getaceres]

Hal seems not to see my hard disks. If I open the HAL Device Manager, I can see
my DVD-ROM and my DVD-RW (both are master and slave in the secondary IDE
channel) but I can't see any of my hard disks (I have two in the primary IDE
channel).
As a result, I can't access to my partitions from the system:/ kio_slave or the
system location in nautilus.
The partitions of both discs are mounted by default on boot.

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4682: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4682

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

In the default mode (dropping root privileges), hal does not create any nodes
for hard disk partitions. It works fine if hal is run as root; the reason is
that hal is not in group "disk", so it cannot read /dev/hd*.

Putting hal into group disk is equivalent to running as root, so this is not an
option.

hal 0.4.x worked much better: it created device nodes for hard disk partitions,
although they were incomplete (of course), but at least you got file system
information for mounted partitions and mount/unmount notifications.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

For the record, the reason is that hal is not allowed to read /dev/hd* since it
is not in group "disk" (and should not be, since it is equivalent to root
privileges).

Maybe hal can be changed to at least create some incomplete nodes for hard disk
partitions.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

This got fixed with the new privilege separation code:

hal (0.5.6-0ubuntu2) dapper; urgency=low

  * Add debian/patches/hald-runner.patch:
    - Fork off a small root daemon hald_runner that communicates with hald
      over p2p dbus and is responsible to start helpers as root. This allows
      the main hald to run with even less privileges and at the same time
      enables active elements like power management.
    - Patch from Sjoerd Simons, taken from upstream CVS.
  * Add debian/patches/privileges-hald.patch:
    - Run hald without any auxiliary groups.
  * Add debian/patches/privileges-addons.patch:
    - storage polling addon: Drop root privileges, run as user hal with
      auxiliary groups (since we need them for accessing CD-ROMs etc.).
    - acpi polling addon: Drop root privileges, run as user hal without any
      additional groups, since everybody can read acpid events.
  * debian/hal.install: Install hal-system-{power,lcd}-* scripts to make g-p-m
    happy. Do not install the storage scripts for now since they rely on the
    integrity of hald (redesigning them is upstream work in progress).
  * Remove debian/patches/hal-dbus_max_match_rules_per_connection.patch, it's
    obsolete.
  * Add debian/run-hald.sh: Script to run hald locally from build-tree.

 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Mon, 23 Jan 2006 13:52:44 +0100

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Privilege separation code is upstream.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

With the new privilege separation code, this is now obsolete.