Mounting of foreign file systems in LXDE

Discussion on LXDE releases and Development. This forum is not the best way to contact the developers, please use the Development mailing list and Sourceforge to interact with them.
Locked
suseuser04
Posts: 6
Joined: Thu Jul 04, 2013 12:39 pm

Mounting of foreign file systems in LXDE

Post by suseuser04 »

Dear LXDE developers:

I don't know LXDE much since I am a beginner.
I am mainly using openSUSE with KDE desktop.
Recently I gave a try to PC-BSD which came with LXDE desktop.

What shocked me after logging in to LXDE desktop that all of the foreign filesystems on different partitions not belonging to PC-BSD were automatically mounted. These foreign filesystems belong to my openSUSE installation. Unfortunately the PC-BS OS froze and I had to hard reset the computer. This resulted in the corruption of all those foreign partitions and degradation of my RAID1 array, since those volumes were not cleanly unmounted due to the hangup. This would not have occurred if those filesystems had been untouched by LXDE.

The mounting of foreign filesystems also a security risk. It is intentional that only those partitions/filesystems can be mounted by regular users which have a "user" or "users" option in fstab. The mounting of filesystems without this option requires superuser access. LXDE disregards this and overrides this rule. I find this a bad policy and bad design. A desktop never should override system-wide settings. I found that PCManFM Edit/Preferences/Volume management has an option to disable automatic mountings of mountable filesystems, but the manual mounting still remains am option.

I wonder whether there is a system wide setting in LXDE where I can force LXDE to follow system rules. That is, only those filesystems to be automounted which have the options "users", and only those filesystems mountable manually which have the options "noauto,users".

Once more, I think that automounting of file systems not specified in fstab is a security risk and risk for data corruption.
Enabling manual mounting of foreign filesystems is a security risk.

Best regards,

suseuser04
Rex Bouwense
Posts: 1093
Joined: Sat Aug 27, 2011 5:44 pm
Location: Sierra Vista, Arizona USA
Contact:

Re: Mounting of foreign file systems in LXDE

Post by Rex Bouwense »

This is probably not the best place to post a request. See the instructions at the beginning of this section:
Discussion on LXDE releases and Development. This forum is not the best way to contact the developers, please use the Development mailing list and Sourceforge to interact with them.
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=89 ... unc=browse
I'm not sure if any of the developers read this forum. Those of us volunteers that are on the forum appreciate your information and input.
Rex
Locked