Sloppy workaround for unreported bug: floppy mounts with root owner

[Niles Rogoff]

Not very knowledgable about this, but I think you can add an upstart job
that runs every time the volume is mounted. This could chmod or chown the
mount dir.

2015-04-18 20:09 GMT-04:00 John Hupp <ubuntu at prpcompany.com>:

> 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. (If so, then
> the problem should appear in Ubuntu as well as Lubuntu.)
>
> See for instance:
> udisks2 mounts floppy disk as root
> Bug fix released
> udisks2: mounts floppy always for root:root (not writable for normal users)
>
> 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.
>
> 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!
>
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