Sloppy workaround for unreported bug: floppy mounts with root owner

[John Hupp]

I installed Lubuntu 14.04 for someone who had an XP-era PC.  He also has 
a really, really old offline PC that he uses for a few familiar 
programs, and wants to ferry some files back and forth between the two 
PC's using floppies.

This should be no problem, except that the floppy mounts in Lubuntu with 
root ownership, and only root can change content, so ordinary users 
cannot copy files to or edit files on a floppy.

Someone somewhere (!) reported that the behavior could be duplicated in 
a virtual machine with no actual floppy drive.

Design behavior should be that the floppy mounts with the logged-in user 
as owner, which is what happens with USB flash drives.

As far as I can tell, this is a new instance of a regression in the 
kernel and/or udisks2 that has previously been reported and fixed.

See for instance:
udisks2 mounts floppy disk as root 
<http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63849>
Bug fix released <http://lkml.org/lkml/2014/5/28/297>
udisks2: mounts floppy always for root:root (not writable for normal 
users) <http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=740190>

I couldn't figure out how to get floppies to mount with the logged-in 
user as owner, but I do have a sloppy workaround that sets a permission 
to allows anyone to change content on the floppy.  This was inspired by 
comment #11 at Floppies mount fine, but can't seem to edit them in 
Xubuntu 14.04 <http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2222487&page=2>.

The sloppy workaround in my case is to add this line to /etc/fstab:
/dev/fd0 /media/user1/disk vfat 
rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks2,user,noauto,umask=0 0 0

This will work fine in a one-user installation, but it fails in a 
multi-user installation.  With user2 as the logged in user, clicking on 
Floppy Disk in pcmanfm to mount it causes the error:
     The specified directory '/media/user1/disk' is not valid.

I would be happy to hear about it if someone can come up with an 
improved workaround!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/lubuntu-users/attachments/20150418/3baa58f0/attachment.html>