mounting an external hard drive now requires admin authentication on version 20.2?

[mservice]

I've just upgraded to Mint 20.2, Cinnamon, 64bit, from 20.1

In my several years of using Mint, I've always been able to mount an external drive or USB without typing my password.

Now, since upgraded, I sometimes am prompted for my password when I insert a device, for example:
"Authentication is required to unlock Samsung USB (/dev/sda1)"

Similarly, when I "safely remove drive" via Nemo, I sometimes get a prompt as well.

My first question is, is this new behavior introduced into 20.2, or a bug I'm experiencing? If it's new behavior, e.g. for security reasons, then it's a concern that it only happens sometimes -- other times I'm able to mount or remove devices without any such prompt.

And next, is it possible to change this behavior so I don't have to type my password every time?

Thanks in advance and let me know if any additional info would be helpful.

[AndyMH]

Shouldn't happen, but still on LM20.1. When you unlock the drive where does it mount? Unless you have set it somewhere else in fstab it should be in /media/you? I'm thinking 'do you own the mount point?'.

What filesystems on the devices - win (fat, ntfs) or linux (ext4, etc.) or is it the same with both?

[mservice]

Correct, it mounts to /media/my_username/name_of_device

The directory my_username at /media/ is owned by root, but I've just logged back onto Linux Mint 20.1 (I have several OS's that I choose from at bootup) and confirmed that the ownership situation is the same there, yet the admin authentication prompt only occurs in 20.2.

Within /media/my_username, name_of_device is owned by me, as well as its contents.

The filesystems on all the USB / external hard drives I use are ext4.

[mservice]

Update: After some trial and error I've just discovered some additional information.

When I first boot up my computer with Mint 20.2, I can mount and unmount devices just fine, with no authentication prompt.

Then, when I attempt to suspend my PC, the suspension doesn't work properly -- it just locks my screen, it doesn't actually sleep.

Upon unlocking the screen, now when I start inserting USB drives, it's once again erroneously prompting me for authentication.

So I guess I have two problems, the first being the suspend malfunction, which for some reason leads to the second problem, the strange mounting behavior.

[AndyMH]

ext4 partitions could be owned by root (but no idea why it would change upgrading to LM20.2 - there hasn't been a username change has there?). You could try

Code: Select all

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /media/you/where_it_mounts

and see if it fixes the problem. The command changes ownership back to you. The device needs to be plugged in and mounted before you chown it.

As to your second issue, this might fix it:
viewtopic.php?f=50&t=351281&p=2028541&h ... t#p2028541
noting as I say in the link, it might fix the problem, but I've no idea what caused it.

[mservice]

Thank you for your replies. The chown command doesn't make an impact.

However, my recent discovery that this authentication behavior is somehow caused by, or related to, my system's inability to suspend, leads me to focus on investigating that suspend problem as the primary problem of interest.

Thanks in particular for the link. I followed that link to viewtopic.php?p=2026089#p2026089, from the same user, and I suspect that the issue he describes at that thread is related to what I'm experiencing -- something to do with nvidia drivers. The solution that user viorel proposes there doesn't quite work for me, though, as I don't have the nvidia-driver-460/nvidia-resume.service file that he or she uses for the solution (nor a similar one for my specific version of nvidia driver, which is 470).

[Evoka]

Hi, I'm having the same issues, cannot suspend, and asking for password to mount after a failed attempt to suspend. Have you found any solutions to the suspension issue?.

[mservice]

Evoka, no, I have never figured out a solution to this issue. In case you've come across a solution in the meantime, please let me know. I'm probably going to re-install 20.1 and go back to that.