Sloppy workaround for unreported bug: floppy mounts with root owner

[John Hupp]

That is an elegant idea, but I don't know how to do that.

For now, I took the path of least resistance to a better workaround.  I 
created /media/floppy.  Then I set Change Content: Anyone permission for 
that.  And finally revised my addition to fstab thus:
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy vfat 
rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks2,user,noauto,umask=0 0 0

This seems to work OK in multiple-user setups, so it is a better workaround.

As a footnote: The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, if that is still 
current, says that /media/floppy should exist, but it does not here in a 
default installation.  See 
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#MEDIAMOUNTPOINT

On 4/18/2015 8:16 PM, Niles Rogoff wrote:
> 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 
> <mailto: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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>

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