In the change from Xfce 4.6.2 to 4.8.0 in Debian testing I noticed a loss of the ability to use Thunar on a remote system to see and mount/unmount USB-connected drives (flash, hard drive). I log on to several systems via SSH with X forwarding to do routine backups of data to external drives. With Xfce 4.6.2 I was able to use the tree listing in the left pane to see and mount those external drives. Since the upgrades in Wheezy (testing) over the past several days the external drives are no longer visible in Thunar instances on those remote systems. Locally, Thunar works just as expected for this.
I should have investigated further. Not only are USB-connected external drives of all kinds affected, but removable media (CD, DVD) are also affected. I used to be able to use Thunar to mount discs on remote systems, but no more. I wonder if this is merely a configuration issue. When my Debian testing went from Xfce 4.6.2 to 4.8 the xfce-goodies metapackage went bye-bye. When I went back into aptitude to re-install my favorite panel plugins and xfburn could I have missed something whose absence would cause this problem? I've tried to search through the aptitude cache to see what might be missing, but I'm at a loss to figure out why a remote Thunar instance running in SSH with X-forwarding should behave differently in this respect than a local Thunar instance.
Good grief! I just noticed today that I had somehow let the platform be listed as Macintosh. These systems are all PC(x86). Sorry.
Applications based on D-Bus might require special care if launched over SSH. That is because accessing the remote D-Bus session from your machine (or the other way around, I am not sure) does not happen out of the box, I think. It's not a bug in Thunar but rather a configuration issue (perhaps it's not even possible to forward D-Bus over SSH). I found http://machine-cycle.blogspot.com/2010/12/ssh-and-dbus-sessions.html but I'm not sure this helps. Anyway, try searching for "D-Bus over SSH" or something similar on the web. I'm closing this bug as invalid because it's most likely not a Thunar issue.
Thank you very much for this information. I'll try to research and understand it. May I ask if you know why the ability to mount remote media and drives through the Thunar interface over SSH was functioning perfectly for me for years, and then just topped working? I know there have been a lot of changes in D-Bus (and SSH and Thunar, for that matter) over recent months. Was that remote mounting functionality unintended and then just happened to get eradicated by recent changes? I will, as I said, try to research D-Bus over SSH to see if I can learn something. I may also just try some alternative methods like pmount to see if they will do what I need. Thank you again for your response -- and for your work on the DE that has provided the best end user experience I've had in several decades of computer use.
(In reply to comment #4) > > May I ask if you know why the ability to mount remote media and drives through > the Thunar interface over SSH was functioning perfectly for me for years, and > then just topped working? Previous versions of Thunar were written on top of ThunarVFS, a file system abstraction layer that didn't require communication over D-Bus for volume management. We now switched to GIO, the file system abstraction layer provided by GLib. This switch made a lot of sense for us. GIO however works differently behind the curtains, and one example is that it uses D-Bus for a lot of things, making it more difficult to use apps based on it remotely via SSH.
Thank you very much, again, for your effort to inform me. I've installed pmount on the systems I'm maintaining remotely, and that gives me the remote device/media mounting capability I need. In the meantime, Thunar is a model of a compact, efficient user interface that can be customized easily to provide just exactly the functionality I need. I'll shut up now so that the activity on this bug report dies down! ;-)