Ubuntu – Why can I not see the USB connected Android device over SSH

11.04androidbansheesshusb

I have a computer running Mythbuntu 11.04, and it has Banshee 2.0 installed on it. I also have an Android phone that I use as a music player.

I want to get Banshee and Android talking to each other so that I can synchronize my playlists and all that good stuff.

Here's the thing… my Mythbuntu machine is hidden away under a desk, where it acts as a sort of file and media server. It has a screen and remote control attached for watching videos, but no keyboard or mouse.

When I want to use Banshee, I access it from one of my other two machines via this SSH command:
ssh -X mythbuntu@192.168.0.64 banshee

So far, so good.

Now, I plug in my Android device to a USB port on the Mythbuntu machine, then open up Banshee via SSH on one of my other computers. The Android device does not appear in the Banshee interface.

For a long time I thought I was missing some driver or something, but after some experimentation, I discovered that if I open up Banshee on the computer itself (in other words, I plug in a keyboard and mouse and test out accessing it directly), then the Android device is automagically detected and everything works as expected.

So… the problem seems to be that for some reason, when I am running Banshee from an SSH connection, it can not see the Android device.

But that confuses me… why should the SSH connection matter? Is it that the SSH user is a different user from the one when I log into the machine directly (I use the same user name and password)?

More importantly, is there a way I can convince Banshee that when I open it via SSH and plug in the Android device that it should talk to the Android the same way it talks to Android when I am sitting at the computer itself?

I hope I've explained the situation clearly.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Best Answer

Why you don't see it

Mounting file systems is a privileged operation on Unix systems. The udisks daemon is used to provide a way for non-privileged users to mount volumes (such as the USB Mass Storage service offered by your phone), but will only allow active sessions to perform the operation.

When you are logged on at the console and haven't locked the screen, you are considered to have an active session. When you ssh into the system, this is not the case. The idea is to only let someone with physical access to the system mount removable devices.

If you mount the phone manually, your music player should be able to access the files on it.

How to find it

Run dmesg and look for your device. It should show up as something like /dev/sdb2. "sd" for scsi disk (scsi instructions are standard for disks now), a letter for the disk (a, b, c, etc), and a number for the partition.
Or run sudo fdisk -l to get a list of your disks and partitions. You'll see it here somewhere.

Mount it manually

Once you find the device path (eg, /dev/sdb2), mount it with this command:

mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt

If you want, make a folder and mount it there instead:

mkdir ~/android
mount /dev/sdb2 ~/android

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Sync Music from Banshee via SSH to Android Device

Seems like while gnomevfs supports accessing files on ssh servers like local ones the c# bindings banshee is using don't.

My guess (it is only a guess right now) would be that if you used fusefs to make the android device appear in /mount like an ordinary device would banshee would see this device. And if this device contained the .is_media_device file identifying it as an MP3 player it would actually use the device.

Let's give it a try (I have set up password-less authentification with my device using ssh keys, my local username is gunter, my username on my android device is root, and since this device isn't rooted ssh is running there on the non-standard port 2222)

sudo mkdir /media/Sulla.home

sudo chown gunter:gunter /media/Sulla.home/

sudo chmod a+r /etc/fuse.conf

...add the following line to /etc/fstab:

sshfs#root@192.168.182.33:/mnt/sdcard /media/Sulla.home fuse user,allow_other,port=2222

A final command at the command-line:

mount /media/Sulla.home

Now the device looks like an ordinary mounted device. Let's hope banshee will be convinced by this.

If this does not work, a possible workaround is to use the FolderSync extension with what we just mounted.

Ubuntu – getting these error messages when I try to view media files on the Android device

The error which was clearly shown is, Unable to mount MTP device. So your system fails to mount(open) this mtp device. Installing mtp-tools package will solve this error and makes your mtp device to get connected.

sudo apt-get install mtp-tools