haldaemon is mad (was: Re: GNOME desktop confused by RAID-1 volume)

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 5 Dec 2007 13:46:50 +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote:

> On Sat, 6 Oct 2007 10:24:14 +0200, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> 
> > Recently, I've noticed that after logging in, a RAID-1 volume is
> > displayed two times. The same two hdd icons, the same Name, the same
> > "Properties" are displayed.
> > 
> > When I choose "Unmount Volume" via the context menu, the second icon
> > stays on the desktop. All its details in the properties dialog change
> > to "Volume: home", and indeed the details for my /home partition are
> > displayed. The "Name" is wrong though, as it's still the size of the
> > RAID-1 volume. When I want to unmount the volume (just as a test) I'm
> > asked "Do you want to empty the trash before you umount?" and the
> > dialog explains what that would yield. If I choose not to empty the
> > trash and proceed, there is an error dialog "Cannot unmount volume -
> > The volume is not mounted" (sure, it's /home). When I mount the RAID-1
> > volume again, both desktop icons refer to it again.
> > 
> > Some desktop component gets confused.

That one isn't solved yet. But:
 
> Additionally, hald now insists on mounting every available partition
> whenever I log in via gdm. Some of the partitions it mounts twice,
> creating orphaned desktop icons. I have yet to take some time and find out
> why it does that and where it saves information about it. It even survives
> a reboot and also happens when logging into an empty home directory. That
> makes me think it saves some related data outside of $HOME. I cannot
> reproduce it with fresh user accounts. It does that only for the user id,
> which was active while I deleted a partition.

This one is solved. PolicyKit was the culprit, giving my uid mysterious
permissions, so that gnome-volume-manager decided to treat all unmounted
partitions as removable media.

However, even if it's from only two days ago, I don't remember what had
led to the following in /var/log/secure:

Dec  3 16:43:53 opc4 polkit-grant-helper[6380]: granted use of action='org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mount-fixed' to uid 500 [auth='root']

Under which circumstances would that happen? How can I reproduce it? All
I did was "su -" and using parted/fdisk to alter the partitioning of
/dev/sda.