Device notifier doesn't announce USB thumbdirve

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

I recently upgraded from LEAP42.1 to 42.2->42.3 and encountered a niggling complaint:

The device notifier will no longer announce/offer to mount a USB thumbdrive that’s formatted in “superfloppy” mode. i.e., no partition table, entire device is formatted as a single filesystem, such as how Windows wants to format such a device if you merely stick it in the computer and select “format” from the context menu.

The drive is detected by udev, I can see the drive LED flash and it will be announced to the system by creating an entry as /dev/sdX. I can detect which device it is by

~> ls -l /dev/disk/by-path/ | grep usb
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  9 Oct 23 11:13 pci-0000:00:1a.0-usb-0:1.2:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0 -> ../../sdb
~>

but the device notifier never notifies of the drive’s existence. So the only way I can mount it is as root, from a command prompt.

Note that if the thumbdrive has a disk signature (i.e. msdos) and a partition table with only a single partition, then the device notifier will notify me of the thumbdrive’s existence and offer to download photos, play music, or just open with the file manager.

I vaguely recall reading SOMEWHERE that this behavior is known to occur, but I can’t recall where I read it. I’ve looked through the release notes for both 42.2 & 42.3 and couldn’t find it in there. But I’d like to know: is this behavior due to a patch for a security vulnerability, or just an accident that got propagated?

It’s annoying enough to make me think the thing to do is go back to LEAP 42.1 and convert that to Tumbleweed.

Thanks,
ron

#2

When this is a regression from (well from which one of the two steps you took?), then a bug report is the way to go IMHO.

#3

I vaguely recall reading SOMEWHERE that this behavior is known to occur, but I can’t recall where I read it. I’ve looked through the release notes for both 42.2 & 42.3 and couldn’t find it in there. But I’d like to know: is this behavior due to a patch for a security vulnerability, or just an accident that got propagated?

I guess a custom udev rule could help here. The default rules for handling these types of devices are located in /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/80-udisks2.rules, and perhaps a rule is setting the ‘UDISKS_IGNORE’ flag, but I’m speculating here. FWIW, I did wonder if this is the rule that might be impacting here?

# special DOS partition types (EFI, hidden, etc.) and RAID/LVM
# see http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partitions/partition_types-1.html
ENV{ID_PART_ENTRY_SCHEME}=="dos", \
  ENV{ID_PART_ENTRY_TYPE}=="0x0|0x11|0x12|0x14|0x16|0x17|0x1b|0x1c|0x1e|0x27|0x3d|0x84|0x8d|0x8e|0x90|0x91|0x92|0x93|0x9$
  ENV{UDISKS_IGNORE}="1"

Anyway, if you want to get this device notified with a suitable udev rule, start by examining its attributes

udevadm info -a -p $(udevadm info -q path -n /dev/sdb

More info here:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/udev

#4

Sorry, I missed a closing bracket. It should have been…

udevadm info -a -p $(udevadm info -q path -n /dev/sdb)