Puzzled using 11.1 RC1 ipv6/ntfs issues

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

First blush of 11.1RC1/kde4.1.3 (although the sysinfo tool says 11.1 (i586) after updating thru the 11.1 repos) leaves me with two important questions:

I had to disable IPv6 to get connected to lan/internet which I didn’t disable in 11.0, which in the long run I would like to have back.

NTFS w/r support is a mystery… the softlink from sbin/mount.ntfs points to etc/alternatives/mount.ntfs which is a softlink that points back to sbin/mount.ntfs-3g which is a softlink to bin/ntfs-3g (a real file).

In my case, a usb hard drive plugged into the machine gets a hal/Device Notifier notification for a user but it cannot be mounted as read-only (as was the case in 11.0). It can be mounted as read or r/w using the ntfsconfig gui tool, but that requires root privileges by the user. Furthermore, the user can’t umount it thru Dolphin and trying to umount it thru the ntfsconfig gui doesn’t seem to work at all… you can uncheck the boxes and close but the device is still visible… since it can’t be “safely removed” via Dolphin and is still visible whether it is umounted or not is not clear.

So it appears that a user cannot send data to a portable hd ntfs device without root password (not acceptable), although usb flashdrives mount r/w without any intervention. I’m looking for a backup solution that doesn’t require root, my previous solution of a softlink “sbin/mount.ntfs” pointing to bin/ntfs-3g (courtesy of swerdna) worked but defeated the purpose of not writing to unauthorized places as was intended. It appears that a lot of thought was put into this convoluted arrangement in 11.1 and I’d like to hear the reasoning. Any advice would be appreciated.

#2

Not completely true.

I can manually mount both external vfat and ntfs hard drives (with root permissions), but once mounted, a regular user can read and write to the drives.

I wrote a bug report (as did others) on the hot plug auto-mounting of external ntfs hard drive not working. I do not think this will be fixed for 11.1 GM. It may be fixed for 11.2 (sometime next autumn).

If you need help with the manual mount commands, just post here, and we can paste them for you.

#3

Thanks for your response, it’s really not a question of whether I can get a portable device mounted. It’s not wanting to give out permissions to others that need copies of data or backups/sync.

#4

Finale:

the workaround to this is not to my liking, but swerdna’s ploy of symlinking to ntfs-3g by “ln -s /sbin/mount.ntfs-3g /sbin/mount.ntfs” works admirably. Attaching a usb harddrive will give a devicenotifier response in kde4, which can be clicked on in dolphin and mounted r/w… then dolphin can be used to “Safely Remove” the drive.

I would exercise care in choosing to go this route, I moved the original mount.ntfs to a place I can retrieve it because this workaround most likely will make all attached ntfs drives r/w which in some cases is not a good practice.

Haven’t got a solution for the ipv6 problem yet.