Why updatedb doesn't traverse my external HD?

[JB]

Reindl Harald <h.reindl <at> thelounge.net> writes:

> 
> 
> Am 24.12.2011 19:58, schrieb Marko Vojinovic:
> > (1) What is the proper place to customize this configuration? I want
> > /media to 
> > be ext4, so that it doesn't get excluded by updatedb. I know I could 
> > reconfigure the /lib/systemd/system/media.mount, but that would probably be 
> > overwritten on update or something. How are these things meant to be 
> > customized?
> 
> /media is for temporary mounts and this design is OK
> mount your drive somewhere else

I think you confuse "temporary mounts" term  with tmpfs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tmpfs
...
It is intended to appear as a mounted file system, but stored in volatile memory
instead of a persistent storage device.
...
On reboot, everything in tmpfs will be lost.
...

Anything mounted on /media has to be of actual "type" of that media.
Btw, a CD mounted on /media, even if temporarily, represents "a persistent
storage device", and certainly NOT "volatile memory" (e.g. of type shm).
   
I think systemd devs need to remove it - it is a pure nonsense.

> 
> > (2) Why is /media being mounted like this? If I reconfigure it back to
> > ext4, is 
> > anything else going to break?
> 
> because it makes no sense to "updatedb" temporary mounts like
> usb-disks, network-mounts and such things since locate-hits
> are normally useless for them and "updatedb" runs forever
> on slow temporary mounts with a hughe amount of files
> 
> 
> 

The place to prune /media is as under F14, that is by path and NOT by fs:
# cat /etc/updatedb.conf-orig 
...
PRUNEPATHS = "/afs /media /net /sfs /tmp /udev /var/cache/ccache /var/spool/cups
/var/spool/squid /var/tmp"
#

JB