Re: Patch: Prompt for required password when mounting a drive

[Nate Nielsen <nielsen-list memberwebs com>]

David Zeuthen wrote:
> Oh, btw, if I recall correctly the plan for integrating LUKS, hal and
> GNOME was always something like this
> 
>  http://flyn.org/easycrypto/easycrypto.html
> 
> which specifically didn't involve passing passwords to the mount program
> =). So, I think this is potentially a bad idea.. it's a bad idea since
> vendors use different mount programs. So, I'd be a little bit opposed to
> such a patch upstream but I do think it would make sense to solve the
> problem in a distro- independent way as, perhaps, outlined in Mike's
> original plan. 
> 
> What I do think, however, is for GNOME to have a GNOME-specific mount
> program with a well-defined API, preference model and user experience.
> We'd be able to put pieces like LUKS encryption, "mounting read-only if
> not authorized" and other things there... Plus we can read from gconf
> what mount options etc. to use so we can have nice Nautilus property
> pages with these bits (ppl following the hal list will know this is a
> huge feature request)... 
> 
> Can also put non-HAL bits like what Nate is asking for

This all sounds great. Definitely a better approach.

But I'm still a bit lost as how you'd detect whether an SMB mount (in
/etc/fstab) would need a password or not. I guess you could try it once,
and if it failed try it the second time with the password, but IMO that
would be just as kludgy as screen scraping.

In short (for the SMB case) you'd need to get the mount helper involved
(ie: mount.cifs/mount.smb/mount.smbfs on Linux, mount_smbfs on FreeBSD),
in somehow letting you know whether a password is required.

With loopback devices, I guess you can detect whether 'encryption' is
specified in /etc/fstab, and assume you'll need a password then.

Cheers,
Nate