Auto mounting USB sticks - HAL stopping umount on users

[mahuro]

Hi All,

I hope you can help me ...

My users are experiencing problems when tryin to unmount / unplug their USB sticks. on RHEL 5.5 (kde).

When chacking permissions on the key , you note the owner has the UID of the user, but the group is root, which is strange as users have their own groups.

Problem is, if you right click on the stick and try "remove safely" an error message pops up, saying somethig about HAL and that the user is not allowed to unmount.

I followed a tutorial somewhere else and created a file under /etc/udev/rules.d/ called automount.rules and in it it says:

# automounting usb flash drives
# umask is used to allow every user to write on the stick
# we use --sync in order to enable physical removing of mounted sticks -- this is OK for fat-based sticks
# I don't automount sda since in my system this is the internal hard drive
# depending on your hardware config, usb sticks might be other devices than sdb*
ACTION=="add",KERNEL=="sdb*", RUN+="/usr/bin/pmount --sync --umask 000 %k"
ACTION=="remove", KERNEL=="sdb*", RUN+="/usr/bin/pumount %k
ACTION=="add",KERNEL=="sdc*", RUN+="/usr/bin/pmount --sync --umask 000 %k"
ACTION=="remove", KERNEL=="sdc*", RUN+="/usr/bin/pumount %k

But users still receive the same message and can not "safely remove" the USB stick.

Can you ake any suggestions ??

Many thanks.

[Rubberman]

I'm running CentOS 5.5 (basically the same as RHEL 5.5) with latest updates. I just tested this myself and had no problem with the "safely remove" option on the mounted KDE disc icon. So, if this problem is a recent development, you need to ask what has changed on these systems in the interim.

FWIW, I don't have an automount.rules (which you say you created yourself) in /etc/udev/rules.d, but I'm not sure it it will be seen until you reboot the system. Also, since most of the rule files are numbered (presumably to allow them to be read in the proper order on boot), you might want to do that just to be sure that the automount.rules file is read after the others, though I'm not sure that would change anything.