Automutating fstab plugging USB device 4500

On 19 Aug 2005 10:31:35 -0700, Pete staggered into the Black Sun and said:

Peter T. Breuer is not exactly the most tactful of people. groups.google him for evidence of *that*, if nothing else.

There's probably some sort of automounter running. Personally, I hate automounters. They just don't seem to deal well with disks that don't contain a valid parbreastion table or CD-R* blanks. And if you have a disklike device that has a mangled parbreastion table, they can make the system very unresponsive as they try to mount parbreastions that don't exist. YMMV though.

The fstab entry may be at least partially relevant. Redhat-derived distros have some non-general keywords available in the options field; things like "kudzu". This is actually something I don't have much experience with, since I never run automounters.

Er... is that Redhat 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, or 7.3? All of those are actually obsolete now, and 7.0 was exceptionally buggy even for a Redhat .0 release.

He's trying to get you to do your own troubleshooting, but he's being all needlely about it. That seems to be what Peter T. Breuer does.

We've got a machine running Redhat 7.3 here at ork. I took a look atetc-hotplug-usb.* and found that a binary calledusr-sbin-updfstab is called when a new device is found via hotplug. This binary reads a file calledetc-updfstab.conf and does stuff according to that config file. However, there's nothing in "man updfstab" about device node permissions or forcing "users" to be in the fstab options field. Maybe the hotplug scripts could do this. I could try doing something here on my Gentoo laptop, but A) Gentoo is running a much more recent hotplug than Redhat 7.n, and no kudzu B) I don't have any USB devices at hand.

For future reference, if you've RTFM and STFW, then it's usually good to mention that in the first question. That way people are less likely to ask if you've RTFM.

This hotplug thing is relatively new to the Unix world, and IIRC the Linux way of handling hotpluggable devices differs a lot from the *BSD way. Has Solaris even acknowledged that USB exists yet? I don't think AIX has. :-)

I think the easiest way to fix this is to turn off hotplug (and make it so that hotplug isn't started on boot--SysV init; easy to fix that) and then add an appropriate fstab line for the device. You lose the automounting that way, but it's trivial to create a desktop icon in your WM that'll mount a device inetc-fstab and open a file manager in that directory. There may be a way to get everything working (automount on the right dir, with appropriate permissions, etcetera) in Redhat 7.3, but I don't know what it is off the top of my head. HTH,

-- Matt GThere is no Darkness in Eternity-But only Light too dim for us to see Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong ----------------------------- penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL