Description of problem: Hal policy causes it to automount all fixed disk file systems. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Fedora9 beta distro. hal-0.5.11-0.2.rc2.fc9 How reproducible: 100% Steps to Reproduce: 1.create an ext3 fixed disk partition, not described in /etc/fstab 2.login to system as root with gnome desktop Actual results: The undescribed fixed disk file system is mounted under /media Expected results: Only fixed disk file system of/etc/fstab should be mounted. Additional info: Under FC6 and F7 the "hal" package included a policy in /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/99-redhat-storage-policy-fixed-drives.fdi which causes hal to NOT automount fixed file systems. In F8, F9alpha and F9beta this file was removed from the hal package. Perhaps this was to accommodate changes in gnome-volume-manager-2.17.0-8.fc8 which had a "storage" tab in "gnome-volume-properties" tool. That tab has "removable storage" options which also applied to fixed storage devices. So in F8 there was an administratively accessible tool to prevent fixed disk automount. In F9alpha & F9beta the gnome-volume-properties lacks a "storage" tab. The corresponding F9alpha and F9beta hal packages do not include the hal policy fdi file. This leaves F9 with no simple means of preventing hal automount of all fixed file systems. Temporary workaround: Copying the 99-redhat-storage-policy-fixed-drives.fdi file from older Fedora distro to F9 prevents the fixed disk automount.
> 2.login to system as root with gnome desktop Lose. You're not supposed to log in as root. You even get a big warning explaining this to you. So it's not like you've not been warned. Care to explain why logging into GNOME as uid 0 is useful? That said, you can already control authorizations via PolicyKit. For example # polkit-auth --user some_user --block org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mount-fixed will block mounting internal disks for user 'some_user'. But I can't remember if it applies to uid 0 or not. Either way, Nautilus is deciding to mount the disks so you are filing bugs against the wrong component.