by mla » Aug 6th, '15, 12:08
OK... Further investigation shows that I cannot be sure about it starting recently, after all. I have, in fact, two separate issues, which show the same symptoms.
1. There is the issue outlined at the beginning of this topic. It seems much rarer than I thought and hence might indeed go back to the polkit update a month ago, even though I have definitely seen it only once -- yesterday. On that one occasion, restarting polkit cured the problem.
2. I keep all my financial stuff in a truecrypt file system and within the last couple of weeks, mounting it produced a spurious request for the root password (after I supplied the truecrypt key), even though I have sudo set up not to require this. The file system got mounted regardless of whether I supplied the root password. Hence my (correct) interpretation was that truecrypt did the mounting and that in addition, the OS spotted a new device and requested the password in order to mount it. Which looked very much like in (1) above.
I have now recalled a change I made about 10 days ago and have also confirmed by experiment that (2) happens reliably even though (1) does not, if I set exchangeable device policy (a) to mount automatically but (b) only to do so for devices mounted manually at least once. Disabling (b) removes the prompt for the root password, but results in a brief notification that the device cannot be mounted.
I am afraid I have no idea when the system started attempting to mount the truecrypt file system. I might not have noticed those brief "can't mount" notices for quite a while, because the file system did in fact get mounted. All I can be sure about is tat about 10 days ago I changed the exchangeable device policy to mount automatically only devices manually mounted once before -- and have been seeing problem (2) ever since. OTOH problem (1) occurred, to the best of my knowledge only once, and got cured by restarting polkit.