Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 242832
Gnome Auto Mount VFAT shortname=lower
Last modified: 2013-03-05 22:51:06 EST
Description of problem: I just installed FC7 a few days ago and am using Gnome as my desktop environment in UTF-8 encoding. One of my daily jobs is to back up my files from my hard drive to my USB portable drive. I use rsync to synchronize the data from ext3 hard drive partition to vfat portable drive partition. I use the following command to do the job: rsync -v -t --modify-window=2 -r -u --delete -z "${SRC_DIR}" "${DEST_DIR}" Everything was fine in FC6. But things were not going well in freshly installed FC7: some of my files were kept being backed up every time when I ran rsync command, although the source files were not changed at all! I tracked down the problem by revealing the default mount options stored in /media/.hal-mtab, as shown here: /dev/sdb1 501 0 vfat nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal,shortname=lower,uid=501 /media/PHD The culprit is the mount option "shortname=lower" which created in vfat partition lower-case directory and file names for the directories and files whose original name is short and all upper case in Linux ext3 partition. Therefore every time rsync deleted the directories and files whose letter case __appear__ changed in vfat, copied the source directory from ext3 to vfat, and then changed the case to lower ones. I checked out the manpage of mount and ran some tests, and found out that the mount option "shortname=mixed" does the right job: everything was kept exactly the same in vfat partition as those in ext3 one. So my question is that where to put my customized mount option in FC7 system, so that every time when a removable device is plugged in, the correct mount option can be used automatically. It seems to have something to do with HAL but I have no idea where to store my mount options. And I also found a config file /etc/gconf/schemas/gnome-mount.schemas which contains something like: <default>[shortname=lower,uid=]</default> I changed "lower" to "mixed", but had no effects at all on mounting plugged drives. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3. Actual results: All directories and files with short and all upper-case names are changed to lower case when they are copied to vfat partition mounted with "shortname=lower", so that rsync cannot work properly! Expected results: Additional info:
Install gnome-mount-nautilus-properties - yes, the UI is horrible, that's why it's not installed by default.
(should add that gnome-mount-nautilus-properties allow you to right click on a volume and change mount options - that's the way it works)
This problem potentially affects the communication of FC7 box with most portable multimedia devices, e.g. digital camera, MP3 player, PDA, etc., most of which are mounted as FAT32 storage. Say I wanna maintain a list of my favorite songs on my MP3 player using rsync, and end up with all short upper-case artist names renamed. It's a disaster! It looks like this bug is caused by the default configuration of HAL. I wrote a configuration file storage-policy.fdi: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <deviceinfo version="0.2"> <device> <match key="block.is_volume" bool="true"> <match key="volume.fsusage" string="filesystem"> <match key="volume.fstype" string="vfat"> <merge key="volume.policy.mount_option.shortname=" type="string">shortname=mixed</merge> </match> </match> </match> </device> </deviceinfo> I put it at /usr/share/hal/policy/95userpolicy/ and restart haldaemon. Then lshal has an output line: volume.policy.mount_option.shortname= = 'mixed' (string) But /media/.hal-mtab still shows shortname=lower! So it seems that my storage-policy.fdi was not loaded by HAL. I also tried /etc/hal/fdi/policy/ but no effects at all either. I remember I have done similar jobs in FC5 and FC6, and they worked. Does anybody know how to do it in FC7? Thanks a lot!
Why did you reassign this to hal? Please don't do that, at least not _without_ justifying it. (In reply to comment #3) > volume.policy.mount_option.shortname= = 'mixed' (string) There properties have been deprecated long ago (since FC5). > I remember I have done similar jobs in FC5 and FC6, and they worked. Does > anybody know how to do it in FC7? Thanks a lot! Did you even read comment 2? gnome-mount-nautilus-properties looks like this fwiw http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gm-prop/gm-prop2.png Just set Mount Options to 'uid=500 shortnames=mixed' and you should be good (replace 500 with your actual user id).
*** Bug 243074 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Sorry for messing it up! The reason is that i had thought it's probably because of some of the default configuration of HAL which uses hal policy to specify the default mount options. However yeterday i looked into the kernel document of fc7 and found that the kernel module vfat uses the default shortname=lower to mount vfat partition. So i realized that most likely neither HAL nor gnome-mount set any customized value for the mount option shortname, so when mounting a vfat, the default value of shortname option "lower" is used. Now i seem to know what's going on. So my final question is that is there way to set a default value for the shortname mount option system-widely instead of specifying it for each user account. I know i can recompile the kernel by setting a default value of vfat module. but is there any easy way to achieve it? Thanks a lot!