Re: PnP external hard drives

Hi Benjamin,

Collar, Benjamin SLC CT PEK schrieb:
> Does anyone know how to make the automount always mount a specific 
> USB device to a specific mount point? I have 4 filesystems on the 
> drive, and I would like it if they are *always* mounted to 
> /media/fs1, /media/fs2, etc

let's see. Automounting in Gnome is done via pmount; "man 1 pmount" 
tells some more:

-- snip --
pmount is invoked like this:

pmount device [ label ]

This will mount device to a directory below /media if policy is met (see 
below). If label is given, the mount point will be /media/label, 
otherwise it will be /media/device.
-- snap --

So, if it's your only other /dev/sd*-device (besides your regular 
sata-harddrive), everything is fine. If you have several such devices 
(like a usb-stick and your usb-drive), one will become /dev/sdb, the 
other /dev/sdc, depending on the order you have plugged them in. That's 
why you are stuck :(

Hm. Some solutions I see:

1. Give each partition a (distinct) label and see, whether pmount 
respects that. (You can add labels to your partition with "e2label" for 
ext2/ext3, with "xfs_admin" for xfs and with "reiserfstune" for 
reiserfs. "mkfs.vfat -n LABEL" sets the vfat-label.)

2. If this doesn't suffice, you can try to add mount-points to 
/etc/fstab that *only* use labels as source-device. (See the 
policy-section in pmount's man page.) I've tried the following with an 
ext3-device (but should work with vfat-labels just the same):

# e2label /dev/sdb1 DISK1
# cat <<EOF >> /etc/fstab
 > LABEL=DISK1 /mnt/disk1 ext3 noauto,rw,users,exec,nosuid 0 0
 > EOF
#

3. If using labels together with pmount doesn't work you can use 
udev-rules in "/etc/udev/rules.d". I use the following to acces my ipod:

-- snip --
BUS="scsi", KERNEL="sd?1", SYSFS{vendor}="Apple", \
   OPTIONS+="all_partitions", SYSFS{model}="iPod" NAME="ipod"
-- snap --

Should be in a file like "/etc/udev/rules.d/95-ipod.rules", all in one 
line. Now, whenever I plug my ipod into my notebook, the kernel/udev 
will create a device "/dev/ipod" for it -- and pmount will always mount 
it accordingly. To make this work for your usb-drive, you have to look 
up some parameters in /sys/** when you have the device plugged in.

I myself would probably go for solution 3; but I'd be interested in any 
other success-reports as well.

Good luck trying,
Jens

-- 
Jens Ruehmkorf
German Aerospace Center
Telephone +49 2203 601-2616
E-mail mailto:[email protected]
Internet http://www.dlr.de/dlr/verkehr

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