I've put this exhange back on the list.
Nick Rout wrote:
do you have hotplug running?
Yes. I'm successfully mounting the USB drive, and automatically unmounting it after its removal. This depends on the SCSI system putting it in the same place - we've discussed this on the list previously. If I've previously plugged in (and even unplugged) a digital camera, then the USB drive won't mount.
What I want to add is the timed unmount that autofs can provide, so that I can whip the USB drive out at any time, without having to worry about manually unmounting it.
I think that I probably need to use automount for the CD as well. Once I've popped a disk in the hole, the little eject button doesn't work - I have to manually unmount the drive (as root) to get it out.
Jim Cheetham wrote:
Yep, that's the one. Debian/Ubuntu package 'autofs'. Here's my simple setup ...
The usb drive that I want hooks up as /dev/sda2 ... /etc/auto.misc (which is named in /etc/auto.master) says bafox -fstype=ext3 :/dev/sda2
I'm letting the default timeouts operate, which seems fine.
This creates /var/autofs/misc/bafox on-demand - cd to it, and the drive will be mounted.
For convenience, I symlinked /bafox -> /var/autofs/misc/bafox
The only complication I have at the moment is that Ubuntu likes to automount things with its own mechanisms, into /media/whatever. I need to grok these better to either find their timeouts, or disable them. At the moment, the first program in wins!
If you have windows shares around, consider this line from my /etc/auto.misc
media -fstype=smbfs,uid=jim,username=jim,password=** ://server/media
:-)
-jim
Douglas Royds wrote:
Cool! This is the mechanism (autofs?) that is discussed in the greenfly article on hotplug - http://greenfly.org/tips/usb_drive.html
I'll bring a copy of this article along, and we can give it a crack, if you're keen. I'll make sure that I've apt-getted autofs before then.
Douglas.
Jim Cheetham wrote:
Also the following USB storage issues: How to ensure that all files have been closed on the USB drive before pulling it out (some sort of flush once/sec while it's plugged in)? User isn't allowed to unmount the drive - have to have root rights to do so!
automount - unmounts the drive after a specified timeout, re-mounts it if you attempt to access the directory it lives in. Wonderful!
-jim
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