Re: firewire/usb2.0 storage & automounting

["Sean \\The RIMBoy\\" <sean@rimboy.com>]

On Fri, 30 May 2003, john doe wrote:

> automounting of a cd works flawlessly in redhat 9

It worked back in Mandrake 7.0 IIRC, but I've always turned it off.  

> automounting of a volume on a usb or firewire hard drive doesnt do anything 
> at all.  i know the current limitation of the automounting on firewire is 
> that the current up to date RH9 linux kernel doesnt map hotplugged firewire 
> devices to dev nodes yet (such as /sda or /scda), but instead only does so 
> on boot.

Not necessarily.  It's a kernel problem though.  If you think about it, 
the kernel knows about the cdrom drive, thus it can monitor it for a 
change in status.  It'll require code in the kernel to monitor the 
firewire bus looking for specific file systems to become available.  It 
should not be hard but it will require some work to account for the 
various (albiet only a few) firewire to ide adapters.  

>  this isnt a big deal (this is fixed in newer kernel versions and 
> in the subversion tree of the ppl doing the firewire drivers).

Excellent.

> my problem 
> is that when i hook up this hard drive through usb or through firewire, its 
> never automounted.

Right.  You may be able to use some of the hooks from USB (is there not a 
usb daemon or something?) but firewire is another story.  

> ideally i would like it automounted either to the 
> desktop of the current logged in user or into /mnt and a link be made for 
> the desktops of all the users.  ive been googling and havent yet found a 
> real solution to this.

Here should be the quick and dirty.  Run the rescanscsibus script linked 
here:

http://www.rimboy.com/firewire/

on a regular basis.  It should find the drive which should hopefully cause 
automounter to realize there's a new device.  YMMV.

> one thing to keep in mind is that the first usb device the system sees is 
> /dev/sda and the second is /dev/sdb, but the icons the user sees shouldnt 
> scream out that the /dev/sd? path is different if the devices were plugged 
> in in reverse order

Ok.  You need to use the filesystem label support that's generally 
available as an option to mkfs.  If you notice RH is doing something along 
the lines of:

LABEL=/home             /home                   xfs     defaults     1 2

Basically, the LABEL statement is telling mount that rather than address 
by /dev/ entry, find the drive with that lable and mount accordingly (this 
info is contained in the above link to my site).  ext2 and 3 should 
support the LABEL option, along with some other filesystems.

> this automounter should be able to be set to mount certain file system types 
> as read only always (such as ntfs) and also set permissions so that other fs 
> types are mounted rw for a certain group and ro for everyone else.

That to me sounds like an option to specify in your fstab.

> maybe even unmount after 30 or 60 seconds if inactivity but as long as the 
> device is still physically plugged in the icon remains on the users desktop.

I would not do that... It would complicate matters.  I would force the 
issue though about unmounting before removing.  I can see where your idea 
would pay off, but it's still pretty risky.

> does anyone know of a direction i might start looking in for this?  i have 
> now fully switched my home system over to rh9 and find having to su and 
> mount annoying when i just want to ro mount my usb drive to listen to an mp3 
> or watch a video.  im not against trying to tackle writing/implimenting this 
> myself but im curious as to what else ppl have done before me towards this 
> end.

Look into the "user" option that's available as an option to fstab.

Sean...


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