I was connecting my HTC phone to another Fedora computer and I realized I didn’t have appropriate permissions to the device. After I plugged in the device, adb gave me the following error:

moxz:~>/usr/local/android/platform-tools/adb devices -l
* daemon not running. starting it now on port 5037 *
* daemon started successfully *
List of devices attached
???????????? no permissions usb:1-2

Googling around I found page as well. The blog post was for Ubuntu and it included a lot of phones, which I didn’t really need. So I decided to create my own udev rules for my Fedora 17 install. The first thing that we need to is figure out the device path of our usb phone. After plugging the phone into the usb slot, we will see the following in dmesg:

moxz:~>dmesg | tail -11
[1004050.455351] usb 1-2: USB disconnect, device number 18
[1004060.234058] usb 1-2: new full-speed USB device number 19 using ohci_hcd
[1004060.426808] usb 1-2: New USB device found, idVendor=0bb4, idProduct=0c86
[1004060.426816] usb 1-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=2, Product=3, SerialNumber=4
[1004060.426820] usb 1-2: Product: HTC
[1004060.426823] usb 1-2: Manufacturer: HTC
[1004060.426826] usb 1-2: SerialNumber: HT164T500742
[1004060.434233] scsi18 : usb-storage 1-2:1.0
[1004061.444207] scsi 18:0:0:0: Direct-Access HTC File-CD Gadget 0000 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
[1004061.450206] sd 18:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg3 type 0
[1004061.468162] sd 18:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk

We can see that our phone device is sdb, now using udev we can query the device for more information, like so:

moxz:~>udevadm info -q all -n /dev/sdb
P: /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.2/usb1/1-2/1-2:1.0/host18/target18:0:0/18:0:0:0/block/sdb
N: sdb
S: disk/by-id/usb-HTC_File-CD_Gadget_HT164T500742-0:0
S: disk/by-path/pci-0000:00:02.2-usb-0:2:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0
E: DEVLINKS=/dev/disk/by-id/usb-HTC_File-CD_Gadget_HT164T500742-0:0 /dev/disk/by-path/pci-0000:00:02.2-usb-0:2:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0
E: DEVNAME=/dev/sdb
E: DEVPATH=/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.2/usb1/1-2/1-2:1.0/host18/target18:0:0/18:0:0:0/block/sdb
E: DEVTYPE=disk
E: ID_BUS=usb
E: ID_INSTANCE=0:0
E: ID_MODEL=File-CD_Gadget
E: ID_MODEL_ENC=File-CD\x20Gadget\x20\x20
E: ID_MODEL_ID=0c86
E: ID_PATH=pci-0000:00:02.2-usb-0:2:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:0
E: ID_PATH_TAG=pci-0000_00_02_2-usb-0_2_1_0-scsi-0_0_0_0
E: ID_REVISION=0000
E: ID_SERIAL=HTC_File-CD_Gadget_HT164T500742-0:0
E: ID_SERIAL_SHORT=HT164T500742
E: ID_TYPE=disk
E: ID_USB_DRIVER=usb-storage
E: ID_USB_INTERFACES=:080650:ff4201:
E: ID_USB_INTERFACE_NUM=00
E: ID_VENDOR=HTC
E: ID_VENDOR_ENC=HTC\x20\x20\x20\x20\x20
E: ID_VENDOR_ID=0bb4
E: MAJOR=8
E: MINOR=16
E: SUBSYSTEM=block
E: TAGS=:systemd:
E: UDISKS_PRESENTATION_NOPOLICY=0
E: USEC_INITIALIZED=1004061498268

The most important information is the following:

P: DEVPATH=/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.2/usb1/1-2/1-2:1.0/host18/target18:0:0/18:0:0:0/block/sdb
E: ID_SERIAL_SHORT=HT164T500742
E: ID_VENDOR=HTC
E: ID_VENDOR_ID=0bb4

Now based on that information we need to create a udev rule to allow others to write to the device. Actually using udev again, we can print a more ‘udev’ friendly output, like this:

moxz:~>udevadm info -a -p /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.2/usb1/1-2
Udevadm info starts with the device specified by the devpath and then
walks up the chain of parent devices. It prints for every device
found, all possible attributes in the udev rules key format.
A rule to match, can be composed by the attributes of the device
and the attributes from one single parent device.

looking at device '/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.2/usb1/1-2':
KERNEL=="1-2"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb"
DRIVER=="usb"
ATTR{configuration}==""
ATTR{bNumInterfaces}==" 2"
ATTR{bConfigurationValue}=="1"
ATTR{bmAttributes}=="80"
ATTR{bMaxPower}==" 2mA"
ATTR{urbnum}=="2662"
ATTR{idVendor}=="0bb4"
ATTR{idProduct}=="0c86"
ATTR{bcdDevice}=="0228"
ATTR{bDeviceClass}=="00"
ATTR{bDeviceSubClass}=="00"
ATTR{bDeviceProtocol}=="00"
ATTR{bNumConfigurations}=="1"
ATTR{bMaxPacketSize0}=="64"
ATTR{speed}=="12"
ATTR{busnum}=="1"
ATTR{devnum}=="19"
ATTR{devpath}=="2"
ATTR{version}==" 2.00"
ATTR{maxchild}=="0"
ATTR{quirks}=="0x0"
ATTR{avoid_reset_quirk}=="0"
ATTR{authorized}=="1"
ATTR{manufacturer}=="HTC"
ATTR{product}=="HTC"
ATTR{serial}=="HT164T500742"

Now copying the above output, let’s create a new rule file called /etc/udev/rules.d/51-phone.rules and put the following into it:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb",ATTR{idVendor}=="0bb4",GROUP="elatov",MODE="0666"

The reason why the file is numbered 51 is because by default the system udev rules change the permission of all USB devices to 664 in rule number 50. Here is the file and line that does that:

moxz:~>grep usb /lib/udev/rules.d/50-udev-default.rules | grep MODE
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", MODE="0664"

So we need to make sure our rule loads after that one (therefore we are 51).Now let’s reload the rules and restart the udev daemon:

moxz:~>sudo udevadm control --reload-rules
moxz:~>sudo systemctl restart udev
moxz:~>sudo systemctl status udev
udev.service - udev Kernel Device Manager
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/udev.service; static)
Active: active (running) since Tue, 05 Feb 2013 13:28:13 -0800; 5s ago
Main PID: 28367 (udevd)
CGroup: name=systemd:/system/udev.service
└ 28367 /usr/lib/udev/udevd

That looks good. Now we have to uplug the device and plug it back it. First let’s check out the current permissions on the USB device. Here is a list of the USB devices on the Fedora machine:

moxz:~>lsusb
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 413c:3200 Dell Computer Corp. Mouse
Bus 001 Device 019: ID 0bb4:0c86 High Tech Computer Corp.

The last one is the phone (bus 001, device 019), now checking out the permissions of the file corresponding to that device, we see this:

moxz:~>ls -l /dev/bus/usb/001/019
crw-rw-r-- 1 root root 189, 18 Feb 5 13:06 /dev/bus/usb/001/019

Now unplugging the phone and plugging it back in, we see the following:

moxz:~>lsusb
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 413c:3200 Dell Computer Corp. Mouse
Bus 001 Device 020: ID 0bb4:0c86 High Tech Computer Corp.

We can see that the device ID has changed. Now checking out the permissions of the new file:

moxz:~>ls -l /dev/bus/usb/001/020
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 189, 19 Feb 5 13:31 /dev/bus/usb/001/020

That’s all good. Now listing the available devices with adb, we see the following:

moxz:~>adb devices
List of devices attached
HT164T500742 device