HELP!! how to prevent floppy mounts under Hardy/LTS

john lists.john at gmail.com
Mon Sep 21 19:04:48 BST 2009


Hi all,

We're having a problem with lots of floppy icons showing up on users
desktops. Basically whenever a user logs on from a computer with a
floppy drive built in it is automagically mounted and shows up on ALL
users desktops. The links never go away and they accumulate as other
users log on and off of those computers. Users cannot delete the
links.

The floppy icons have dynamically generated entries in
~/.nautilus/metafiles/x-nautilus-desktop

it looks like this.

vbuntu:~/.nautilus/metafiles$ cat x-nautilus-desktop\:%2F%2F%2F.xml
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<directory><file name="floppy0.volume.4" timestamp="1253553871"
icon_position="64,22"/><file name="floppy0.volume.3"
timestamp="1253553871" icon_position="64,102"/><file
name="floppy0.volume.2" timestamp="1253553871"
icon_position="64,182"/><file name="floppy0.volume"
timestamp="1253553871" icon_position="64,262"/></directory>

Deleting the xml file has no effect on the links.

The floppys have a mount point in /media under the usersname it might
look something like this.

/media/doe.john/floppy0

ls is not allowed to list ownership/permissions even by root

 ls -la
ls: cannot access floppy0: Permission denied
total 8
drwxr-x---  3 root domain users 4096 2009-09-21 08:56 .
drwxr-xr-x 34 root root         4096 2009-09-21 10:37 ..
d?????????  ? ?    ?               ?                ? floppy0

the only way to see the correct permissions and remove this is to do:

umount -fl floppy0

which then lets you do ls:

 ls -la
total 12
drwxr-x---  3 root domain users 4096 2009-09-21 08:56 .
drwxr-xr-x 34 root root         4096 2009-09-21 10:37 ..
drwxr-x---  2 root domain users 4096 2009-09-21 08:56 floppy0

then root can do rmdir floppy0

I guess I'd like an explanation of what the heck is going on and then
hopefully some advice about
how to tell gvfs or whatever is mounting floppies to stop.

thanks!

John



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