Comment 6 for bug 1726299

I found a way to make this work!

Apparently when you connect the device it isn't authorized. I read here (http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/12/project-bolt-improves-thunderbolt-security-linux) that Redhat is working on making a GUI which will offer you a dialog to authorize, but for now it needs to be done manually.

What one needs to do is to locate the device in the tree of devices in sysfs and authorize it. Here is a small snippet that will identify the device and write the authorized flag into the correct file:

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sudo bash -c 'echo 1 > $(dirname $(grep -l "Thunderbolt to FireWire Adapter" /sys/bus/thunderbolt/devices/[0-9]-[0-9]/device_name))/authorized'
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(In case the command is broken up, that's supposed to be all on one line)

This assumes that your FireWire device indeed uses the label "Thunderbolt to FireWire Adapter" as its name, which is the case at least for the Apple FireWire dongle. I'm not sure if there are any others, but if so you may need to look inside the "devices" folder manually and look for a "device_name" file with similar content. Then "echo 1 > authorized" into the "authorized" file in the same folder.

This was tested with the v4.15-rc1 kernel. I haven't tested earlier kernels.