Gigolo is a frontend to gvfs
. gvfs
uses FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) in order to mount network devices (such as Windows shares). Such mountpoints cannot normally be read by other users than the user who mounted it, even by root
. Why? Karl Auer suggests here that the reason is that
Just because you have root access on one system doesn't mean you should
be allowed to see the files to which other people have access on other
systems. I'm pretty sure that is why the .gvfs directory is managed the
way it is.
That is, if you are user A on machine X, and you mount some directory from machine Y (where you also have a login) to some place on machine X, then root
on machine X shouldn't be able to read that, because root
on machine X may not usually have any access to machine Y at all.
Bearing that in mind, if you do want to allow root
to acces your ~/.gvfs
directory, you can proceed as follows.
1) Edit the file /etc/fuse.conf
and uncomment the line that reads #user_allow_other
. This will later allow your user to start the gvfs-fuse daemon with the allow_root
option, which is what you want. The following command does it quickly for you:
$ sudo sed -i -e 's/#user_allow_other/user_allow_other/' /etc/fuse.conf
2) Add your own user to the fuse
group, so that you may read the the file /etc/fuse.conf
. Otherwise the change in the previous step would have no effect.
$ sudo addgroup USERNAME fuse
$ newgrp fuse
Replace USERNAME
with your username, of course. The newgrp
command avoids the need to log out and back in again for the group change to take effect. Check that it works by issuing the command:
$ groups
and verify that fuse
is listed among the groups that your user belongs to. If it does not work, log out and back in again. At any rate, your user should be able to read /etc/fuse.conf
before you proceed with the next step.
3) You are now able to restart the gvfs-fuse daemon with the allow_root
option. First, unmount your ~/.gvfs
directory:
$ fusermount -zu $HOME/.gvfs
Next, to restart the daemon, issue the following commands on Ubuntu 13.10:
$ killall gvfsd-fuse
$ /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-fuse -o allow_root $HOME/.gvfs
In older Ubuntu versions, the latter two commands may instead be:
$ killall gvfs-fuse-daemon
$ /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfs-fuse-daemon -o allow_root $HOME/.gvfs
4) Restart Gigolo and mount your Windows share again. root
should now be able to read your ~/.gvfs
directory.
That's it!
In order to make these changes permanent:
To make the changes permanent, you can write the three commands from step 3 into a small script that you autostart at login time. There may be cleaner ways to do this, but this should work. Your script would contain something like the following:
!#/bin/bash
fusermount -zu $HOME/.gvfs
killall gvfsd-fuse
/usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-fuse -o allow_root $HOME/.gvfs
Save that to a file and make the file executable:
chmod 755 /path/to/the/file
This script should now be automatically executed at login time. To find out how to autostart applications, refer to How do I start applications automatically on login?.
Some more discussion on the issue can be found here:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/2008-November/165644.html