Bug#788662: Logged-in user no longer granted permission to removable disks

[Josh Triplett]

On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 09:28:37PM +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:
> Hi
> 
> Am 14.06.2015 um 20:42 schrieb Josh Triplett:
> > The disk was mounted, but the device file itself was not made
> > read/write, so dd'ing a Debian .iso to it required root.  Previously,
> > that has worked for the logged-in user without requiring root.  (I don't
> > know how long ago this stopped working.)
> 
> Is your user in group floppy?

Yes, since it's one of the default groups added to the user created by
d-i.

> Removable media was owned by root:floppy in older udev releases IIRC,
> i.e udev in wheezy.
> AFAIK, we never applied ACLs for removable media. Instead rely on
> udisks2 to grant unprivileged users write access.

I thought I'd seen removable media handled via the ACL mechanism,
uaccess or similar.  Perhaps an older version of udisks granted
permission to the device node?

In any case, it seems unfortunate that users can no longer write an
image to a USB disk without using root.  Especially because that makes
it easier to make a mistake and overwrite the wrong disk.  I've made a
habit of always dd'ing as non-root, to make it somewhat less likely that
I'd overwrite a system disk.

What would be the appropriate package to assign this to to request a
restoration of the functionality (though not the group-based mechanism)
that worked prior to the jessie release?

- Josh Triplett