kio_media's HAL backend dying

[Antonio Batovanja]

Binary package hint: kdebase-kio-plugins

Kubuntu 7.10:
ii kdebase-kio-plugins 4:3.5.8-0ubuntu2.2

Kubuntu 8.04:
ii kdebase-kio-plugins 4:3.5.10-0ubuntu1~hardy2

(this is a copy of the upstream bug)
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=173031

Version: (using KDE 3.5.10)
OS: Linux
Installed from: Ubuntu Packages

On KDE 3.5.10 (Kubuntu 8.04) and 3.5.8 (Kubuntu 7.10):
kio_media loads on demand, HAL backend is active.

Navigating to system:/media with Konqueror or Dolphin initially works (all
entries are there), but after a while nothing is shown and notifications of USB
sticks or CSs/DVDs are not shown. When I navigate to system:/media, I can click
on the CD icon, but get an error message (translated) "this function is only
available with HAL".

Further investigation (reading source code) shows that it is a problem with
kio_media's HAL backend.

While everything is working fine, executing
$ dcop kded mediamanager fullList
returns (as expected by Dolphin):
/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/volume_uuid_2e648e91_f15c_4b78_8680_37dea36b783e
 sda2
 498G-Medium

 true
 /dev/sda2
 /
 ext3
 true

 media/hdd_mounted

 ---

and after a while, the same command returns:
/org/kde/mediamanager/fstab/devsda2
 sda2
 Festplatte (sda2)

 true
 /dev/sda2
 /
 ext3
 true

 media/hdd_mounted

 ---

(note that the first line is different)

Looking at mediamanager's source code, I'd say that HAL backend has a problem,
since the second answer comes from the fstab backend.

Calling
$ dcop kded mediamanager reloadBackends

fixes the problem temporarily.

I have this problem on 100+ installations, but I cannot reproduce it on my
laptop. I don't know what exactly is causing the problem. Maybe dbus is
disconnecting kio_media, and kio_media is not reconnecting afterwards?
The only thing I see is cups sending very frequent add/remove printer
notifications on system dbus, I don't get these notifications on my location.

For reference, dbus versions are 1.1.1 (Kubuntu 7.10) and 1.1.20 (Kubuntu
8.04).

Our temporary solution is a cron job executing dcop query, and issuing
reloadBackends when needed (mailing us active processes and last log entries).
Since activating that job on a couple of workstations this morning, everything
works fine... If I do get error reports, I'll post them here.

Anything else I could check?
Compiling KDE from scratch is not a possibility here, sorry.
Toni

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

KDE has stopped maintaining kio_media, so it is unlikely that this bug will ever be fixed.

[Jürgen Sauer (juergen-sauer)]

this is in Hardy, aka LTS - so it must be fixed - this is not a windoze system

[Antonio Batovanja (toni-toni)]

I'm with Jürgen on this, so I did some more research.
After reading bugs #227838 and #25931, it could be related to the fact that gdm has been moved from priority 13 to 30 in rc2.d, so that HAL can start before gdm. But kdm still has priority 13. And we use kdm.

I have an (Clonezilla-created) image I've installed on about 200 PCs, at first Gutsy, then upgraded to Hardy:
root@xxxx07:/etc/rc2.d# ls -l *kdm
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 2008-04-11 14:36 S13kdm -> ../init.d/kdm
root@xxxx07:/etc/rc2.d# lsb_release -d
Description: Ubuntu 8.04.2

I'm going to change the priority of kdm to 30 and hope it helps...

[Antonio Batovanja (toni-toni)]

Let's give it another try...

[Antonio Batovanja (toni-toni)]

May I ask why?

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

Nothing's changed since it was closed the first time.