[arch-general] coping with damaging updates

[Martti Kühne]

On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 9:49 AM, Mick <bareman at tpg.com.au> wrote:
> Following yet another update that has disabled user control of USB
> sticks, cameras, etc. and blocked user from shutting down from the
> desktop (in my case xfce4), I am at the end of my tether.

hello

Indeed recent updateds did fuck around with group memberships, I had
to add myself again to disk, camera and iirc video groups in
/etc/group. I could swear I was a member in those groups before. There
is no way to be forewarned about this stuff, but if you could please
find out which updates are causing this stuff, we could inform the
devs about it in a more precise fashion. The other fact is that recent
udev changes modified many of the group-based permissions, which you
can only solve with manual intervention.

Solving these problems: USB sticks, cameras etc are basically
represented as device nodes in /dev, eg. /dev/usb respectively. You
can display those device nodes and their owner and group easily enough
by printing them with ls -l:
martti at deepthought:~$ ls -l /dev/sr0
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 11, 0 Oct 27 05:33 /dev/sr0

so, I have to check if I'm a member in group disk:
martti at deepthought:~$ groups
disk lp wheel video audio optical camera power vboxusers wireshark martti

Oh, I am a member in that group and may access/mount that device. If I
happen not to be, I can add myself to groups like so:
# usermod -G <groups,comma,delimited> <user>

cheers!
mar77i