mount.ocfs2 doesn't accept mount option "uhelper=udisks"

[Warwick Bruce Chapman]

Scenario:

3-node Ubuntu AoE*/OCFS2 Cluster on Ubuntu Server sharing disks with Ubuntu Desktops

Node 1: Oneiric ubuntu-server amd64 with disk shared using AoE and formatted and clustered
        with OCFS2.
Node 2: Oneiric mint-desktop i386
Node 3: Oneiric ubuntu-desktop amd64

Background:

1. Initially implemented AOE to share disks in node 1 (SAN) formatted XFS

2. Needed to access FS on disks from more than one Ubuntu desktop client

3. Implemented OCFS2 cluster and formatted one disk (label "Backup") in node 1 with OCFS2 to test

Problem:

4. Mounting the disk using Nautilus fails with the following error thrown by Nautilus:
Unable to mount Backup
Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 1: mount.ocfs2: Invalid argument while mounting /dev/etherd/e2.0p1 on /media/Backup_. Check 'dmesg' for more information on this error.

dmesg includes the following:
Jan 6 02:06:52 anthracite kernel: [ 8672.067816] (mount.ocfs2,27208,1):ocfs2_parse_options:1512 ERROR: Unrecognized mount option "uhelper=udisks" or missing value
Jan 6 02:06:52 anthracite kernel: [ 8672.067824] (mount.ocfs2,27208,1):ocfs2_fill_super:1233 ERROR: status = -22

As I understand it the uhelper=udisks mount option relates to the disk showing up in the "Devices" section of Nautilus.

Further:

5. Nautilus mounts the AoE shared XFS devices without error, even on multiple devices simultaneously, posing risk to FS integrity (intentional AoE design)

6. Creating a mount point and mounting the disk (AoE shared OCFS2 "Backup") using the mount command works fine and it still shows up in the "Devices" section of Nautilus:

# mount -L "Backup" /media/Backup/

Synposis:

7. It would thus appear that mount.ocfs2 does not support this mount option. This is understandable given that OCFS2 is used heavily in server-only environments and not in sharing for use by Linux desktop machines.

8. However, such use cases will surely increase and it should be trivial to add support for this mount option.

Thanks very much.

*ATA over Ethernet

[Rafael David Tinoco (rafaeldtinoco)]

That change would have to have happened in Nautilus, since the "external helpers" feature is something done by the "umount" utility, which redirects the umount requests to a wrapper (helper), but, before, removing the uhelper flag from the umount requested.

I'm marking this as "won't fix" because the request was done to ocfs2-tools and it is pretty old. If you still want to pursue this, I would recommend opening a new bug targeting Nautilus and udisk utilities and it will probably be considered a "wishlist" if not implemented by upstream until today.