nautilus fails to reuse existing /media mount point

[john spurling]

Binary package hint: nautilus

When selecting an NTFS partition listed in the "Places" menu, Nautilus attempts to mount the partition at /media/name, creating it if necessary and setting the owner to the current user. If the mount point was already created by Nautilus in Ubuntu 9.10, it will be owned by root. This will prohibit Nautilus in 10.04 from mounting the volume at this mount point, so it will create a new one at /media/name_ (with an underscore appended to the name) and mount the volume successfully.

synec@mercury:~$ ll /media/
total 44K
drwx------ 2 root root 4.0K 2010-04-26 21:11 26585CB3585C8389
drwx------ 1 synec synec 20K 2010-04-17 10:39 26585CB3585C8389_

While the volume is mounted successfully, programs that expect files to be at /media/name won't know that the path to the files has changed. An example of when this might be important: a collection of music files on an NTFS volume has been added to Rhythmbox's library.

Reproduction steps:
- install Ubuntu 9.10
- mount an NTFS filesystem with Nautilus's "Places" feature
- upgrade to 10.04
- mount the same filesystem again, and notice that it doesn't get mounted in the same place

Workaround: sudo rmdir /media/*

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: nautilus 1:2.30.0-0ubuntu4
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-21.32-generic 2.6.32.11+drm33.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-21-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Architecture: amd64
Date: Wed Apr 28 16:42:38 2010
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release amd64 (20091027)
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: nautilus

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

This should have been fixed in

udisks (1.0.0~git20100305.fa313b2-1) unstable; urgency=low
  [...]
  * debian/udisks.postinst: Migrate DeviceKit-disks mtab file on upgrade.
  [...]
 -- Michael Biebl <email address hidden> Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:17:21 +0100

But unfortunately this only covers udisks -> udisks upgrades, not devicekit-disks -> udisks upgrades.

Workaround: Remove the old mountpoints manually.

Fix: postinst needs to drop the versioned check of $2 in

    # migrate DeviceKit-disks mtab on upgrade
    if dpkg --compare-versions "$2" lt-nl "1.0.0~git20100227.36c8a4-2" && [ -d /var/lib/DeviceKit-disks/ ]; then
        if [ -s /var/lib/DeviceKit-disks/mtab ] && [ ! -s /var/lib/udisks/mtab ]; then
            cp /var/lib/DeviceKit-disks/mtab /var/lib/udisks/
        fi
    fi

This does not affect maverick any more, or hardy->lucid upgrades, only karmic->lucid upgrades.

[Alexandre Magno (alexandre-mbm)]

In Ubuntu 14.04 LTS an user mounts /media/USERNAME/his-mount-point from Nautilus's sidebar. Other user can not use or remount the same unit in his /media/USERNAME/his-mount-point path from Nautilus's sidebar. It is mounted and he/she is without permissions.

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

Alexandre, that is how it is supposed to work and not what this bug is about. When you mount the disk it is presumed that anyone else logged onto the system should not be able to access the files on "your" disk, hence the permissions are set so that you have access rather than anyone.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

lucid has seen the end of its life and is no longer receiving any updates. Marking the lucid task for this ticket as "Won't Fix".