Strange File Manager/CLI Behavior

[vwgtiturbo]

I have a really strange issue going on with Suse 10.1. This system has been running flawlessly since I updated the package manager, and got the system up to speed (a few months now).
I had an issue where a regular user could not mount drives that are set to NOT mount at boot. If I tried through the GUI, I would receive a 'kio_media... Internal Error'. I could however mount drives from teh CLI. Checking the fstab revealed nothing, so I basically erased some info, and put it back in, the resaved the file. No go... Then I opened up YAST and used the partitioner. For some reason, the 'allow user to mount' option was not checked off, even though I checked it off during the install (months ago) and there is a corresponding 'users' option in the fstab. After checking this box on all of the drives affected, another problem came up...
I can not create files or directories within the GUI. I get the aforementioned 'Internal Error'. The 'rw' option is present in the fstab, and the drives are vfat/ext3, so... I can, however, open a Konsole, and create whatever I wish.
I haven't done any recent updates (I am told by Zen that there are no updates) so I am not sure what the heck happened. Any ideas of where I can look?

[dkeav]

switch to the smart package manager, should be on the dvd install media

yast2 --install smart smart-gui and update and upgrade there was a known bug that users have been posting and bitching about with the filemanagers in the 10.1 release, should be fixed now if still having problems then the mount/umount and corresponding binaries are probably not setuid which most of those graphical applications require, but is a security risk

[vwgtiturbo]

Okay, I updated my channels (the ones that came with SMART when I installed it) and upgraded all packages (against my better judgement, as this has ALWAYS caused me problems in the past), and I had 850MB of stuff to update. It didn't take too long, but the machine hung when I went to restart it, so I just killed it for the night. I will try to get to it today, and see how well it went.
One more question though... Has the mount option (in the fstab) 'users' been deprecated or something? Usually, I use that option so that a user can mount AND umount a drive (instead of using the 'user' option and only being able to mount the drive) and it has always worked well. For some reason, when I changed the option to 'user', it still lets me mount AND umount the drive, which is just a little odd. I looked in the mount man pages, but didn't see anything that would lead me to believe that 'user' and 'users' are now synonymous...

[dkeav]

users may be a mount option for the specific filesystem you are mounting, each filesystem has different options, iirc smbfs/cifs shares support users as an option, most other filesystems do not

[vwgtiturbo]

Looking at the man page for 'mount', 'user' and 'users' is a universal option, not dependent on the filesystem mounted. In any case, I have used these for years (well, the three whole years off and on that I have used *nix), and have never had any problems.

Now, I performed the system update yesterday, ran the update again today, and still had a lot to update, so I performed it again. Trouble...

I hate Suse, let me tell you... EVERY single time I do a system update (across all packages) something gets fried. Why couldn't Novell just leave well enough alone?

This time, when I click on My Computer on the desktop (or sysinfo:/ in Konqueror), I can only see the mounted drives. So, instead of seeing all drives (mounted and unmounted) and being able to use that screen to mount and umount as appropriate, I can only umount already mounted drives. Now, I CAN go to the CLI and mount a drive, but the sysinfo:/ doesn't update to reflect that, so I still have to use the CLI to umount it. It isn't a big deal, but it sure is annoying.

I am able to create files and directories now though, so that is a good thing.

One more question... Does the latest build of Suse 10.1 have NTFS write support? I mounted an NTFS drive, and was able to create a directory on it?!? Interesting...

[dkeav]

user Allow an ordinary user to mount the file system. The
name of the mounting user is written to mtab so that he
can unmount the file system again. This option implies
the options noexec, nosuid, and nodev (unless overridden
by subsequent options, as in the option line
user,exec,dev,suid).

users Allow every user to mount and unmount the file system.
This option implies the options noexec, nosuid, and nodev
(unless overridden by subsequent options, as in the
option line users,exec,dev,suid).

[vwgtiturbo]

It took me a bit, reading this a few times to see what the difference was, but I think I have it now. But what dictates the difference between 'an ordinary user' and 'every user'?

[dkeav]

an ordinary user would be a user like you, that has a full shell account and full permissions to execute most binaries on a machine

every user would be just that "every" user, meaning any actual account could do the mounting, ie apache user or daemon, or dbus etc etc