Written by giner the 26 Apr 08 at 21:15.
Related project: Gnome.
Status: New
Rationale
Since Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 Gnome using GVFS. This is a great feature, but have some dangerous issues!
See my steps:
1) I go to ftp://user@ftp.site.com by nautilus and gvfs automatic mount it as directory at $HOME/.gvfs/somedir
2) I remove my home dir: rm -rf $HOME
Whats wrong?! I've removed all files on my FTP Server! OMG!
It can be fixed by moving .gvfs dir from $HOME to separate directory (for example to /usermounts or /gvfsmounts or /mnt/gvfs or some else) and creting link in $HOME if it's necessary.
Why do we need the symlink in home? If it is mounted with the correct permissions I think it would be pointless to have the mount 'appear' in two locations.
Ok, my first thought is why inthe world are you rm -rf $HOME, but none the less, $HOME should not contain the mount point for ANYTHING!!!
Despite the common excuse of "works as intended", this was a BAD implementation. media, including ftp, should be mounted in /media like any other storage device. This should be considered a bug.
I would say this should be change to the proposed solution regardless of the given example.
My scenario is experimenting with CIFS shares (on freenas) and when using rsync to backup my home directory (to CIF share on disk a) I suddenly find I'm also backing up a whole other CIFs share (disk b) as well. Not what was exected.
This makes the whole CIFS/SMB thing more opaque than it needs to be. Mount the shares to /mnt or /media which is where I was execting them to be when first trying this out a few days ago. Don't hide them away in the users home directory!
once again, the .gvfs folder bit me in the ass. This time, after mounting a remote folder in nautilus via sftp, my backup software saw tens of thousands of new files in my home directory (under .gvfs) and uploaded them overnight. This cost me a few $ as well as wasting my time.