Hello everyone:
I am fairly new to this list, just subscribed a few days ago.
I work at a school and we run k12ltsp. Most of our equipment is old most don't even have usb ports.. Currently kids carry their work back and forth via floppy or send it to themselves via email. Floppies are very unreliable, and sometimes the kids have powerpoint or multimedia projects that are too big for a floppy. I do have a stand-alone linux machine with front-access usb ports and we'd like for kids next year to be able to copy their homework from a usb pen drive to their home directories by logging into this stand-alone machine, and inserting their usbstick/usb pen drive and copying their updated work.. The challenge to this, if I understand this correctly, is that every pen drive is configured as a different scsi device. The first one is sda, the next sdb. This is what works so far:
I added this line to the fstab file:
/dev/sda1 /mnt/flash vfat noauto,users,rw 0 0
And it allows me to mount the pen drive as root or as my user name, and I wrote a little script that copies the contents of the pen drive to the "flash" folder in my home directory, then unmounts the pen drive and tells me to go ahead and exit. I take out that pen drive, log out, log in as a different user with a different pen drive and the script no longer works because the next pen drive is not identified as sda, it is now sdb, and my script no longer works. If you restart the computer, it works the first time with whichever pen drive you start out with, which then becomes sda, however, I think it is impractical to have the kids restart the machine when they come in to copy their homework to their home directories..
My users are kindergarten through 12th grade. Obviously kindergarten kids are not carrying work back and forth on usb pen drives, but the 4th and 5th graders are. Some kids are more adept than others, and I'd like to automate this as much as possible. Using the command line to mount a floppy is too much to ask the kids to learn, let alone teach them how to determine what Linux decided to call their usb device. I believe mtools is being used at the terminals to access floppies, and supposedly can be configured to access a usb device, but I am trying to learn and conquer one thing at a time. If I can get one "station" set up for copying files to and from USB devices, then maybe I can get the terminals to mount the usb on a remote box.
I found this below posting about using mutliple USB mass storage devices with one linux system.
http://www.webservertalk.com/archive235-2004-4-193597.html
I tried his instructions but don't really understand them, so I don't know why it is not working:
<snip> Problem: multiple USB pen drives register as separate device names (starting with /dev/sda1, next one is /dev/sdb1, etc). There seems to be no consistent way of figuring out automatically what device is mounted under what letter.
Solution: the updfstab utility automatically updates the /etc/fstab as long as it knows what device is being plugged in. problem is, since linux uses a generic driver for mass storage devices, updfstab doesn't always know that the device is flash memory. so, to fix this problem, the updfstab configuration file's (/etc/updfstab.conf.default) flash memory section should look like this:
device flash {
partition 1
match hd CompactFlash
match hd ImageMate
match hd "USB Drive"
match hd "Flash Drive 2.0"
}this will match any device that has any of these descriptions (the ones in quotes are the descriptions of the pen drives I am using). you can find the description of your brand of pen drives by using the output from dmesg.
so once updfstab is recognizing your usb pen drives as flash memory, it will automatically add /dev/flash to the /etc/fstab file, allowing you to simply mount /mnt/flash
and not worry about whether it's /dev/sda1 or whatever. voila! <end snip>
When I type the command dmesg when you have a pen drive inserted I get more information than I know what to do with, sometimes. Sometimes the output is very small and concise. Suffice it to say I am confused about this. However I can determine that one device is getting called sda, then next is sdb. I added the "Attache 2.0" and "Compact Flash" to the section that was already there in the updfstab.conf.default file.
device flash {
match hd CompactFlash
match hd ImageMate
match hd "Attache 2.0"
match hd "Compact Flash"
}(A copy of the entire updfstab.conf.default file is pasted at the bottom of this, I only added those two lines, the rest probably is just as it was when originally installed). This did not work, the assignment is still the same depending on what order I insert the pen drives after a reboot.
I have looked at what ever I could find on google about mounting USB pen drives keychain drives, etc. to see if I could get some tips. I'm stumped.After I solve this, then I need to figure out how I can call the virus agent to check the contents for viruses before copying them to the student's home directory. But one thing at a time.....
Thanks for any help you can give me.
Rita Gibson
(updfstab.conf.default)
symlink false partition 0
device cdrom {
symlink true
match cdrom
}device cdwriter {
symlink true
nofstab true
match cdwriter
}device jaz {
partition 4
match hd jaz
}device zip {
partition 4
match floppy zip
match hd zip
match floppy clik
match hd clik
}device ls120. {
match floppy ls120
match floppy ls-120
}device camera {
partition 1
match hd DSC
match hd CAMERA
}device memstick {
partition 1
match hd MSC
}device flash {
partition 1
match hd CompactFlash
match hd ImageMate
match hd "Attache 2.0"
match hd "Compact Flash"
}device floppy {
match hd USB-FDU
match floppy USB-FDU
match floppy FD
match floppy "floppy drive"
}device diskonkey {
partition 0
match hd diskOnKey
}device microdrive {
partition 1
match hd IBM-DMDM
}
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