[arch-general] coping with damaging updates

[Mick]

On Thu, 27 Oct 2011 16:45:20 +0200
Martti Kühne <mysatyre at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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,
Somebody, probably upstream, made a decision to code this behaviour
into the updated package therefore they can and should be documenting
it.

> 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.
If I manage to track it down I will be putting in bug reports.

> 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>
> 

Just checked and I can't see any changes to what I set myself.

[mick at cave ~]$ groups
lp,wheel,log,locate,http,video,audio,optical,storage,scanner,camera,power,users,wireshark

oops disk is missing, no, group disk exists and I am a member of it, its
just the group command telling fibs.

Sometimes this breakage is silently fixed at a subsequent update,
otherwise I have stumbled on a fix by accident.

mick