On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 10:54:48AM +0000, Brett Parker wrote:

On 17 Mar 13:05, Chris Green wrote:

...

I have been trying to diganose/fix this automount problem for quite a while.

Automount of CDs, DVDs and USB sticks works fine on two of my xubuntu 11.10 systems but not on my desktop system.

While trying to diagnose this I have found that it makes a difference using a remote display!

If I run thunar on my system called 'test' where it works I see:-

thunar-volman: Unsupported USB device type.
thunar-volman: Unsupported USB device type.
thunar-volman: Unknown block device type.

... and the USB stick automounts fine.

If I do exactly the same except by a remote ssh connection to 'test' from my desktop system 'chris', I see:-

thunar-volman: Unsupported USB device type.
thunar-volman: Unsupported USB device type.
thunar-volman: Unknown block device type.
thunar-volman: Could not detect the volume corresponding to the device.

... and the USB stick *doesn't* automount.

When I run thunar locally on my desktop system I see the same output (and failure to mount) that I see when running via ssh on 'test'.

What on earth is going one?

Try, on the one that isn't working: sudo modprobe vfat

Then plugin the stick again. If it works, then the issue is that you haven't got the vfat module loaded by default.

While vfat isn't loaded by default it should get loaded by the automount process I think.

Anyway doing 'sudo modprobe vfat' didn't help.

If (having rebooted so vfat isn't loaded) I manually mount the USB stick then the vfat module gets loaded as a result:-

chris$ lsmod Module Size Used by rfcomm 47946 4 bnep 18436 2 bluetooth 166112 10 rfcomm,bnep pci_stub 12622 1 vboxpci 23200 0 vboxnetadp 13382 0 vboxnetflt 23441 0 ... ...

root@chris:~# mount /dev/sdd1 /media root@chris:~# lsmod Module Size Used by nls_iso8859_1 12713 1 nls_cp437 16991 1 vfat 17585 1 fat 61475 1 vfat rfcomm 47946 4 bnep 18436 2 bluetooth 166112 10 rfcomm,bnep pci_stub 12622 1 ... ...

I'm pretty sure my fundamental problem lies somewhere in udev/dbus not doing the right thing and loading all the gvfs stuff. On the system where this doesn't work there are *no* gvfs processes started:-

chris$ ps -ef | grep gvfs chris 7969 6203 0 11:13 pts/6 00:00:00 grep gvfs

Whereas on all the systems where it works OK there are lots of gvfs processes:-

chris@test:~$ ps -ef | grep gvfs chris 1674 1 0 Mar18 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd chris 1679 1 0 Mar18 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/gvfs//gvfs-fuse-daemon /home/chris/.gvfs chris 1726 1 0 Mar18 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfs-gdu-volume-monitor chris 1728 1 0 Mar18 ? 00:00:01 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfs-afc-volume-monitor chris 1733 1 0 Mar18 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfs-gphoto2-volume-monitor chris 1735 1 0 Mar18 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-trash --spawner :1.12 /org/gtk/gvfs/exec_spaw/0 chris 1904 1 0 Mar18 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-network --spawner :1.12 /org/gtk/gvfs/exec_spaw/1 chris 1913 1 0 Mar18 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-dnssd --spawner :1.12 /org/gtk/gvfs/exec_spaw/3 chris 5632 5532 0 11:14 pts/0 00:00:00 grep --color=auto gvfs

What I suspect is some sort of permissions/configuration cock-up somewhere (that I've probably caused). The trouble is that the whole dbus/udev/gvfs thing is very poorly documented.