Procedure on mounting USB/hotplug devices

[Tim]

Tim:
>> No, I'm saying that dynamically connected things don't have an entry
>> written for them in the fstab file, automatically.  Additional to that,
>> you wouldn't mount them in that abbreviated manner, manually.

Marko Vojinovic:
> No? And what service provides automatic mounting (in runlevel 3, no X active)?

There wasn't one.

> And what if automounter doesn't work as expected?

You're equally up the creek without a paddle.

This situation is not good, and you're not the first to complain about
it.  I haven't seen a decent suggestion about resolving it.  I've seen
comments to use gnome-mount, which as we both feel, sounds silly.  Not
to mention being yet another thing to learn, and a convoluted thing, at
that.

And I've seen arguments on both sides as to whether a text only mode
should have an automounter.  Myself, I feel that if you've plugged a
flashdrive into the socket, you want to use it.  Why should you have to
play the role of the computer to mount it?

Yes, I see the need in proper dismounting before an unplug, but there's
a world of difference between a simple "dismount flashdrive" command and
a varying "mount /dev/variable-name ..." command.

> I plug in my USB flash memory, kernel detects it, udev creates /dev/sdb for 
> it, and that's it. There is nothing in /media, nothing in /mnt. I have to su 
> to root, and manually mount it via
> 
> # mount -t vfat /dev/sdb /some/directory
> 
> which of course works, but is a pain since only root has privileges for 
> accessing the data.

A difficulty with this, that you'd otherwise put entries into the fstab
file, is that you can't always predict which device a removeable drive
will be found at.  You might have two drives, that aren't always used.
Today your flashdrive might be /dev/sdb tomorrow it could be /dev/sdc.

The move towards drive labels avoids that issue.  But it's a right
nightmare to add a label to a Microsoft filesystem on Linux.

> So what is the name of the daemon that should do all this 
> for me? (it doesn't seem to work properly, so I need to tweak with it...)

Last I looked into it, it was some interaction between HAL and either
Gnome or KDE.

>> or you can use gnome-mount to get it work out the details.

> Well, I tried something like
> 
> $ gnome-mount --device /dev/sdb
> 
> and the first thing it did was to complain that there is no X running (!!), 
> than it falls back to text-mode, complains that it cannot find any partitions 
> on /dev/sdb, and fails. It does not detect the filesystem, it does not read 
> off the label, it does not create a mount point.

Shouldn't that be something like sdb1 rather than just sdb?

> But I think that the fault is in hal not providing appropriate info for it, 
> since "lshal | grep sdb" returns nothing. Hal does not seem to have detected 
> the flash memory, so gnome-mount knows nothing about it.

Just to muddy the waters, there's been a bit of an ongoing issue with
udev and USB devices lately.  Some people have been unable to mount
things.  I think it must be hardware dependent, as I don't have those
problems (currently).

>> I haven't quite got around to looking at manual mounting on FC7, it's
>> working automatically for me, quite fine.

>> I think you might want to have a look at man gnome-mount

> Besides from not being intended for direct usage, I get the feeling that it 
> simply does not work properly without Gnome running. It reads settings from 
> gconf (which may not exist)

Yes, I don't think much of things that rely on gnome-something (gconf,
etc.), when Gnome shouldn't be a requirement.  I've been right peeved at
gconf, just lately, trying to sort out a keyboard issue.  That's
something that I don't think should be handled by gconf.

> All in all, I believe the culprit is hal in this particular case. But how do I 
> get it to work?

I think you need to look into how to make HAL rules.  It's changed a lot
since the last time I looked at that (I had to fiddle around to get a
digital camera mounted to read its files - that was a nightmare).  But I
still feel that the user shouldn't have to go around modifying HAL rules
for something as commonplace as a flash drive.

> Of course, I can always edit /etc/fstab and put in appropriate data by hand, 
> and this will work, but that is a workaround, not a solution, right?

I tend to agree.  You paint yourself into a corner trying to write fixed
rules for non-fixed media.

-- 
(This box runs FC5, my others run FC4 & FC6, in case that's
 important to the thread.)

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.
I read messages from the public lists.