Topic: USB Mount Manager?

[judgej]

Does anyone know of a USB disk mount manager for SME Server? I am trying to make plugging in hard drives less of a 'keep your fingers crossed that it mounts in the right place' affair.

What I find, is that some disks will mount to /media/usbdisk. But then if I unmount, unplug, and plug in another drive, it gets mounted to /media/usbdisk1. Sometimes. When it feels like it. Being able to swap over hard drives for backup is not very reliable, because the backup (DAR2) never knows where the hard drive may end up.

Now, I know the OS has features to allow you to specify exactly where eahc disk is mounted, according to the serial number of the disk or the volume label of the FS on the disk. Setting this up is notoriously difficult, and decent documentation is nigh-on impossible to find.

So, I'm hoping there is some simple tool I can use to set these things configured - either an admin panel plugin or a comment-line tool. Anyone know of one?

USB disk mounting is described as 'it should just work', and to a point it does. However, 'just works' and 'does the right/expected thing' can be worlds apart

-- Jason

[mmccarn]

I'm having the same issue w/ USB drives; this is all I've found: http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=35466.0, but I've been afraid to install it.

[judgej]

I'm having the same issue w/ USB drives; this is all I've found: http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=35466.0, but I've been afraid to install it.

Thanks - I'll take a look. If I can get my hands on the source RPM, then it should be easy enough to check what it does. Like you, I'm a bit wary of any contrib that messes around with the OS at such a low level (and we are probably talking HAL level here).

USB disk mounting is not just for backups. Another use could be to mount specific disks onto i-bays to extend storage capacity.

-- JJ

[byte]

Moving this topic to the SME 7.x contribs forum, it is more appropriate there. Thanks!

[wjhobbs]

Being able to swap over hard drives for backup is not very reliable, because the backup (DAR2) never knows where the hard drive may end up.

What I have done to solve this problem is label my backup partitions to 'backup2' like this

Code: [Select]

/sbin/e2label /dev/sda1 backup2
I then adjust the fstab entry to look like this

Code: [Select]

LABEL=backup2  /media/backup  auto  noauto,defaults  0  0
Note that I did not use the standard /media/usbdisk as the mount point.

Hope that helps a little.

John

[judgej]

What I have done to solve this problem is label my backup partitions to 'backup2' like this

Code: [Select]

/sbin/e2label /dev/sda1 backup2
I then adjust the fstab entry to look like this

Code: [Select]

LABEL=backup2  /media/backup  auto  noauto,defaults  0  0
Note that I did not use the standard /media/usbdisk as the mount point.

Does fstab actually stay set like that? I got the impression the HAL daemon (or something like that) updated the file automatically as drives were plugged in and removed, and that manual changes were not permanent.

If it is that simple though, I'll give it a try. Thanks!

-- JJ

[Jean-Philippe Pialasse]

I have done a contrib few month ago to manage usb disk and auto mount :

http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=35466.0