Human Readable  

 

     
   
     

Mounting Devices As Root

Written by Darrell Anderson.

I was trying to access CDs and my only USB flash drive while logged in as root. (Please spare me the litany of running as root. I don’t have time to play the su root or sudo lobotomy game while I am in severe testing and learning mode with my new box. I could not access those devices, which surprised me with root privileges.) I kept receiving error messages of:

security policy in place prevents this sender from sending this message to this recipient.

If I added root to the plugdev group, then I received an odd message at console login:

Warning: add_groups: Invalid function

Even when I added root to the plugdev group, I still could not access my CDs and USB stick. Yet the auto-mounting seemed to run well as normal mortal user.

After some surfing the web, I ran across some information about manually editing /etc/dbus-1/system.d/hal.conf. I added the following to hal.conf:

<!-- Allow root to mount volumes and avoid login error message about plugdev -->
<policy user="root">
<allow send_interface="org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume"/>
<allow send_interface="org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume.Crypto"/>
</policy>

That ended the problem. Thereafter when I inserted a CD or the USB stick, I could access them as root as the devices seemed to then auto-mount. That was really all I wanted. However, I found nothing like this on the web and I therefore suspect I now am running Slackware abnormally.

Next I have to figure out how to use the mount points I want. Right now the CD or USB stick auto-mount to /media/disk and /media/disk-1. I would prefer mounting to /media/dvdwriter and /media/usb or something similar.

I also cannot access my floppy drive at all.

Finis.

Next: Anomaly With Compiling SMP 2.6.21.5 Kernel

Table of Contents