Arch Linux

Vincent91

Member

Registered: 2009-03-25

Posts: 10

User groups and permissions problem

Hello everyone,

I've been running Arch Linux for about a month now and I have noticed a few things related to permissions associated with user groups that annoy me. My user is part of the storage, wheel and network groups, amongst others. I can see this when I run the `groups` command. From what I could read on the Wiki, the storage group should allow me to mount/umount drives such as my USB key and my iPod when they are plugged in and access the files from my user account without using sudo. The network group should let me manage the network connection via ifconfig, iwconfig, etc. once again without using sudo.

However, when I run iwconfig as my normal user, I get incomplete and inaccurate information. I get about 2 lines telling me essentially that I am not associated with any Access Point, which I clearly am. When I run it with sudo, I get the full information, including my Access Point's ESSID. iwconfig does not get the same data when run with and without sudo. Same goes with ifconfig. Also, I can not run dhcpcd or wpa_supplicant at all as a normal user.

I get a similar problem with the storage group. I can not mount or umount drives without sudo and I can not write to mounted drives that I've mounted with sudo. This is particularly annoying when I try to manage my iPod.

Does anyone have a clue what could be causing this?
Thanks a lot

Anonymo

Member

Registered: 2005-04-07

Posts: 427

Website

Re: User groups and permissions problem

I have searched Google and the Arch Wiki, have tried a lot of the suggestions from the forums, such as the 'how I beat policykit and hal' forum post.  Nothing seems to let me mount my drives.  I can see them in Nautilus, I click them but they don't mount.  I can do it as root.  It's really frustrating because I can't figure it out.  I haven't filed a bug report because I thought it was a problem that I was having.
I haven't tried the iwconfig or network yet.

This is pretty much the only thing holding me back from everything working.