Disable auto-mounting in Ubuntu 16.04

Question

I'm working on creating an Ubuntu variant that has a lot of forensic analysis tools etc installed. However I can't seem to find out how to disable auto-mounting at all..I want it to NEVER mount anything, I always want to mount something manually.

I've done some searching and found this: How can I use gsettings to disable device automount in Ubuntu 16.04?

However, if I use: gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.media-handling automount false

It still auto-mounts. Also the thread says something about

The reason it failed on this occasion seemed to be caused by the lack of environment variables being set, notably $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS.

Now I have now idea what this last part mean, anyone care to explain or have any other solution to fully disable auto-mounting cd/usb/sata etc.

Answer 1

One way of doing that is to write an udev rule that makes udisks2 ignore any added block devices. This can be done by dropping a file 10-myudisks2.rules in /etc/udev/rules.d with the rule:

ACTION=="add|change", SUBSYSTEM=="block", ENV{UDISKS_IGNORE}="1"

This is documented in:

man 7 udev
man 8 udisks

Answer 2

We also recently has this issue - we wanted only authorized USB Drives to be used. This is how we accomplished it - Using Ubuntu 16.

Disable the /media folder

Disable non root user access to the media folder

chmod 400 /media

Make an Approved Mount Point

Provide an alternative mount point for approved USB Drives.

mkdir /approvedusb
mkdir /approvedusb/financepen
chmod -R 777 /approvedusb

Insert Approved USB Drive

We need to calculate the approved USB Drives blkid

su blkid 

Then write the UUID Code into the /etc/fstab

UUID=AEF0-9F26  /approvedusb/financepen  auto,user,rw,defaults,nobootwait      0 0

Answer 3

if its fuse mounts there are settings for gnome and mate desktop as such:

  gsettings set org.mate.media-handling automount false

  gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.media-handling automount false

Its also important to keep in mind that this is a per user setting. So it is valid only for the current desktop user....

check with:

gsettings list-recursively  org.mate.media-handling

and

gsettings list-recursively  org.gnome.desktop.media-handling 

Due to the mixed nature of the mate desktop (there are always some gnome apps I use) there seem to be some gnome settings leaking into the desktop configuration. So I always set both parts to make sure.....