Hi

I thought I'd put together some notes in case anyone was trying to get RedHat 8 to support a card reader like mine. I've got a fairly cheap PQI Travel Flash 6-in-1 reader. It's a shame that RedHat 8 support is almost there but falls a little short of 100% support. This info might be well known and I was just unlucky in my searches.

Thanks to people on this list who helped, and Erik Troan of Red Hat who helped with updfstab and pam_console.

First - to see more than one device on the card reader I needed to rebuild the kernel to probe multiple LUNs - that step is well documented elsewhere.

Then is is possible to see the devices and mount them manually with a full command line.

RedHat includes updfstab which is run by the hotplug scripts. It makes entries in /etc/fstab such that you can mount your devices with a simple command - eg. mount /mnt/smartmedia

To make that work you need to map from the 'Model' string found in /proc/scsi/scsi to the device name. I made these additions to the /etc/updfstab.conf.default file:

device smartmedia {
partition 1
symlink true
match hd "USB Storage-SMC"
}

device compactflash {
partition 1
symlink true
match hd "USB Storage-CFC"
}

device multimediacard {
partition 1
symlink true
match hd "USB Storage-MMC"
}

device memorystick {
partition 1
symlink true
match hd "USB Storage-MSC"
}

The USB Storage-* strings can be seen in /proc/scsi/scsi

At this point it is possible to plug in the reader, then the card, and mount /mnt/smartmedia but only as root. To fix the permissions pam_console is used.

The config file this time is /etc/security/comsole.perms. I added:
# in the device classes section:

<smartmedia>=/mnt/smartmedia*
<compactflash>=/mnt/compactflash*
<multimediacard>=/mnt/multimediacard*
<memorystick>=/mnt/memorystick*

# in the permission definitions section

<console> 0600 <memorystick> 0600 root
<console> 0600 <smartmedia> 0600 root
<console> 0600 <multimediacard> 0600 root
<console> 0600 <compactflash> 0600 root

Now it is possible to plug in the reader, flash card, and mount as the logged in user.

Finally - I'm assuming you're using gnome - on the panel, right click, Add to Panel, Utility, Disk Mounter. Right click on your new mounter and configure it (Preferences...) giving it a mount point of your choice (eg. /mnt/smartmedia)

Now you should be able to plug in your 6-in-1 reader and mount & unmount flash cards from the desktop. You get a file manager icon that pops up on the desktop while the flash card is mounted. It's now very user friendly!

The next steps could be...

* nice representative icons in the RedHat theme for flash cards
* a daemon like the CDROM one that auto mounts on insertion
* auto install to run though the steps above when an unrecognised mass storage device is inserted... surely it is possible?

-Cam



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