gvfs-fuse fails to start on NFS mounted homes
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
gvfs |
Expired
|
Medium
|
|||
gvfs (Ubuntu) |
Incomplete
|
Low
|
Ubuntu Desktop Bugs |
Bug Description
Binary package hint: gvfs
gvfsd usually start a gvfs-fuse-daemon for GVFS mounts, which fuse-mounts to $HOME/.gvfs. This fails if the home directory resides on an NFS share with root squashing enabled. Thus, users in a corporate/networked environment with such NFS homes cannot use gvfs effectively, since a lot of applications rely on the fuse mount.
For those unfamiliar with NFS, root squashing means the local UID 0 is mapped to the anonymous/nobody UID on the remote system when it tries to access the NFS share. Since home and subdirectories have permissions 0700, $HOME/.gvfs cannot be accessed by root in this case. This makes the mount() call of gvfs-fuse-daemon fail (verifiable with 'strace gvfs-fuse-daemon /home/user/.gvfs').
There are two solutions to this:
a) disable root squashing
b) move the .gvfs directory somewhere else
a) is not a good choice for security reasons. b) seems not to be possible at the moment. I looked at the sources for the current (jaunty and karmic) gvfs package and found
mount->
in daemon/mount.c. Even though gvfs-fuse-daemon can be called with any path you like, it looks like the path which gfvsd uses for the call is hard-coded. I was able to symlink /home/user/.gvfs to /tmp/.gvfs, and this works. But I am not sure if that is a good solution.
I would like to ask the package maintainers to a) include a README.NFS in the package which points out the problem and workaround (I can write one if you like) and b) forward this bug upstream to the right place, so the path with which gfvs-fuse-daemon gets called can be configured.
Changed in gvfs: | |
status: | Unknown → New |
Changed in gvfs: | |
importance: | Unknown → Medium |
tags: | added: patch |
Changed in gvfs: | |
status: | New → Expired |
Thank you for your bug report. The issue is an upstream one and it would be nice if somebody having it could send the bug the to the people writting the software (https:/ /wiki.ubuntu. com/Bugs/ Upstream/ GNOME)