Thunar sometimes mounts USB drives with root permission

Alexander Schwinn @alexxcons said:

Same bug on launchpad: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/thunar/+bug/1332623

Related Forum thread: https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=12541

Can be reproduced like that: 1.) After a reboot 8or before) , plug in a USB stick (or USB HDD or card reader) 2.) In thunar Right->Click eject the drive 3.) Plug it out and than in again --> Now with only your mouse (or Ctrl+V), you cannot paste files or create a new folder/file.

Seems to be a thunar problem, since nautilus does not suffer from it.

Andre Miranda @andreldm said:

I can reproduce after the thumbdrive is ejected/reinserted or unmounted/mounted. Workaround: close Thunar window and reopen. So probably Thunar is storing some messed up state.

Alistair Buxton @ali1234 said:

According to the LP bug this is fixed by https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=787731

However Ubuntu 18.04 has glib 2.56.1 and this bug still happens. It is probably a good place to start looking though.

groucho said:

I can reproduce this with glib 2.58.2 and thunar 1.8.2.

Another workaround (that might also help debugging this, maybe):

go up one level from the USB drive's root folder (e.g. from /run/media/username/usbdrivename to /run/media/username).
now the user should own /run/media/username and have permission to write on the drive.
if /run/media/username is still marked as owned by root, refreshing the view (with ctrl+R or F5) of /run/media/username solves the issue.

Alexander Schwinn @alexxcons submitted a patch:

The actual problem seems to be, that the GFileInfo of the related ThunarFIle is not reloaded / the related Thunarfile is not removed after eject.

The attached patch fixes that by reloading the ThunarFile. Now for "eject + re-plug", things are fine.

However if the volume is plugged out without pressing "eject" before and re-plugged in, than first the view will be empty / will show nothing. Just selecting some other volume and than re-selecting the usb-stick fixed this glitch.

So it looks like something else (the view? ) needs to be triggered for reload as well .. to be further checked.

~~Patch 8242~~, "WIP patch":
0001-WIP-fix.patch

Alexander Schwinn @alexxcons submitted a patch:

The attached patch fixes the bug, but ...

It fixes the symptoms, not the actual problem. As far as I can tell, the actual problem is, that after "eject" we still have a ThunarFile, a Volume and a ThunarDevice for the mount ... so far I did not find out why that is the case. To be further investigated.

Since I would like to release thunar 1.8.3 soon, I am thinking about pushing the patch above, but keeping this bug open for further investigation. You think that sounds like a good idea ?

The above described problem (unplug without eject) is a seperate bug, which as well happened before. Not related to this one ( WIll open a new bug for it )

Patch 8257, "patch":
0001-Thunar-sometimes-mounts-USB-drives-with-root-permiss.patch