The VL-hot thread

[Joe1962]

We now have vl-hot-config working with the codepages and charsets, without them, it was breaking vl-hot.conf, as it would save empty strings to those and so mount would fail. I will be off on vacation/holiday to the beach for a couple of weeks, so I might not have time to build and upload a new package, but you can checkout the HEAD from the BerliOS svn, there is a compiled vl-hot-config in there.

I have not see this to tell you the truth... I thought you could put your settings wherever you want... I have /etc/vpackager.conf now, which has been there since the G1 era. I've made changes to it, but never seen anything like a fixed path

Hmm... I will have to check your code, when I moved from G1 to G2-2.8.0, the settings code broke, when checking the help for the new syntax, it seemed to be saying that it was a fixed path.

[123456789]

Problem: VL-hot mounted external harddisks
appear to be noexec by default.  Enabling exec
in the Mount tab of vl-hot-config does indeed
cause a line in /etc/udev/vl-hot.conf like this:
        MOUNTSYNC="noatime,exec"
but the volumes still seem to be mounted noexec:
attempts to directly run scripts from them
continue to fail with errors like
        /bin/sh: bad interpreter: Permission denied
Since the volumes don't show up in mtab and
I'm not familiar with udev, I could not determine
whether the problem is on the udev or on the
vl-hot side.  But skimming over the udev changelog
after 118, nothing jumped out at me, so I report this
here.
By the way, neither "excluding" nor "including" the
device in question (/dev/sdb6) in the
Mount tab in vl-hot-config seemed to make
any difference, so maybe I just don't get it
how this tab is supposed to be used.

Workaround: Creating a manual fstab entry
with mount options defaults,noatime,exec,rw
solved this problem for me. 

Configuration:
Approx. VL-current as of 2008-09-12
vl-hot-config 1.0.4
udev 118
Linux 2.6.22.19 SMP
External partition type: reiserfs

For the next vl-hot release, it would be nice to
know if exec is actually supposed to work,
and/or how to debug this further.

In any case: Thanks a lot for VectorLinux!

[Joe1962]

Just uploaded vl-hot-1.9.20 and vl-hot-config-1.9.20 packages at the BerliOS project page. I'll have to leave the source code svn commits for another day though.

Main changes are: ported to Gambas2, a rethink of alert and debug messages, extensive debugging and refactoring, UI fixes and a whole other bunch of details I forgot to write down along the way...

https://developer.berlios.de/projects/vl-hot/

[Joe1962]

Problem: VL-hot mounted external harddisks
appear to be noexec by default.  Enabling exec
in the Mount tab of vl-hot-config does indeed
cause a line in /etc/udev/vl-hot.conf like this:
        MOUNTSYNC="noatime,exec"
but the volumes still seem to be mounted noexec:
attempts to directly run scripts from them
continue to fail with errors like
        /bin/sh: bad interpreter: Permission denied

I can confirm this. I missed it because I never needed to exec anything from a pendrive or USB drive before. Nobody else reported it before either. This will take some study, because the actual mount command issued seems correct, but the resulting mount is actually "noexec"...

actual command executed for my FAT32 pendrive:

mount -t vfat -o noatime,exec,uid=root,gid=users,fmask=0111,dmask=0000,quiet,user,shortname=mixed,codepage=850,iocharset=iso8859-1 /dev/vl-hot/sda1 /mnt/vl-hot/KINGMAX

result of running the mount command afterwards to check the mount point:

Code:

/dev/sda1 on /mnt/vl-hot/KINGMAX type vfat (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,noatime,uid=0,gid=100,fmask=0111,dmask=0000,quiet,shortname=mixed,codepage=850,iocharset=iso8859-1)

Any ideas?

By the way, neither "excluding" nor "including" the
device in question (/dev/sdb6) in the
Mount tab in vl-hot-config seemed to make
any difference, so maybe I just don't get it
how this tab is supposed to be used.

All the UI elements in vl-hot-config (and my other programs , like vcpufreq, for that matter) have a pop-up message explaining them. In this case, you can see that it says:
"Enter a space-delimited list. Example: sda*, sdb1, sdc2"

IOW, loose the "/dev/" part and trailing slash.

[wcs]

Any ideas?

I think it's because "exec" needs to come after "user".

From the "user" option in "man mount":

This option implies the options noexec, nosuid, and nodev (unless  overridden by subsequent options, as in the option line user,exec,dev,suid).

[Joe1962]

I think it's because "exec" needs to come after "user".

Dang, I knew "default" had to be overridden later on the line, if used; missed the same about "user" though"! Thanks, I'll get on it tonight, if I can.

[caitlyn]

Thanks for all your hard work on this.

[Joe1962]

Thanks for all your hard work on this.

You're welcome! Version 1.9.21 packages are up on the BerliOS project page now, for your upgradepkg pleasure...

I moved the "user" to the start of mount options in vl-hot-functions, so overrides (like "exec") should work. Please test this, as I didn't have time to format my pendrive into a Linux filesystem and exec obviously does nothing on FAT32. This begs the question: would it be useful/necessary/practical to define mount options per different filesystem type?

The subversion source code repo trunk is now updated and also tag 1.9.21 created.

http://developer.berlios.de/projects/vl-hot/

[caitlyn]

Joe:  Would you like the latest version added to the testing repository?

Pls let me know,
Cait

[Joe1962]

I think we should, it seems to be working pretty well, at least for me...

I'm about ready to call it 2.0 after I get some feedback on the exec issue.

[caitlyn]

Joe:  I grabbed the two VL 5.9 packages.  I didn't see any for VL 6.0 nor did I see source tarballs or build scripts for our source repositories.  PM me and let me know where I should be looking, please.

I'm actually doing VL 6 repo maintenance now.  I'll get to the VL 5.9 stuff tomorrow.

[Joe1962]

Sorry about that, I haven't gotten around to making source tarballs yet. I could try and set up a packaging script that pulls from the svn repo. Anyway, you can just copy and rename the packages to 1vl6, there's nothing in there that's version specific. One thing though, I have been using Gambas2 2.8.x for some time now and we only have 2.5.0 in the 5.9 and 6.0 repos. This could affect vl-hot-config. I'm not sure who built the last one, but we need to nudge them to set up Gambas2-2.8.2 runtime packages.

[uelsk8s]

I did the last packages, and i can do current versions, when I get back home next monday.
If anyone want to grab the buildscript before i get back they are welcome to it.
Joe, IIRC it is your buildscript we have been using.

[Joe1962]

Hmm... my gambas buildscript was giving me some errors on 2.7.x and upwards, so I had to remove some of the cp instructions, then ended up just removing the "stop on any error" stuff. I've lacked the time to finish the changes necessary to build gambas in separate packages as defined by the developer, and also to make it compatible with the default VL buildscript. Still, I guess it will have to do for now...   However, I won't be around to make and upload a presentable runtime package out of my not-so-presentable full package until Saturday or perhaps even Monday.

[Joe1962]

Has anybody tried "exec" yet?