This is a headless server special. I'm whipping up a server for one of my buddies. He expressed strong interest in using the USB ports. The server is headless, and offers samba and netatalk services. The user has no intention using a shell and unix commands to do mounts. So I brushed on my autofs and udev skills.
- Udev: I came up with a fixed naming scheme for the usb devices, based on the location of the physical USB plug they are connected to. Away with /dev/sde, returning as /dev/sdf after wake-up. The names are no longer linear (sda ... sdn), a hierarchy is respected: Front/Back plane, and plug 1, 2 ... n on each plane. Inside, e.g. a "Front/2-Orange/" directory, a flat list of devices named disk-1 ... disk-n is generated when a multivolume device was plugged-in. - Autofs: There is a set of autofs rules to reflect the device hierarchy into the same hierarchy of folders. Only paths to devices actually plugged-in are shown: you don't see the -in my case- 8 usb plugs all the time. There is a short timeout, so if all goes reasonably well the devices mount and unmount automagically, and you can pull a plug on the headless server without destroying the filesystem of the device. - Mount script: When mounting the "USB" share from a Finder or Explorer, a script is called that scans the devices hierarchy and executes "ls" commands into the automount path. So the share is automatically populated, and you have as much time as the timeout delay to navigate to a disk. From there autofs will see the path is in use and will not unmount. The end product looks like this picture: plug 2 devices, then navigate. Get out of the share and wait for the timeout, and you can unplug safely. (Works with windows explorer, too) I can package the various files I am using if someone is interested. All this relies heavily on the specific hardware of a machine, so that would be for inspiration only. My platform is debian/lenny, kernel 2.6.28. +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Filename: usb.jpg | |Download: http://forums.slimdevices.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=8480| +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ -- epoch1970 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ epoch1970's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=16711 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=69926 _______________________________________________ unix mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/unix
