This page was exported from phaq
[ http://phaq.phunsites.net ] Export date: Sun Feb 9 4:03:24 2025 / +0000 GMT |
For my company's hard disk-based backup system I needed the ability to automount disk drives by their device name into a standard directory structure. One possible approach would be to add some lines like these to fstab:
This may be good enough in some cases, though it wasn't sufficient for me, when there were dozens of device nodes which could get mounted eventually. So I basically wanted something that would allow me to just access a directory, while the underlying disk was mounted automatically, then having it unmounted automatically if not in use, but still being dynamic in it's nature so it would auto-adjust. Now there's a simple trick using an AutoFS feature called "executable maps", which would allow me to achive this all. The idea is, that all devices (let's say /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, /dev/sdb1, /dev/sdc1 as an example) will get mounted to /mnt/disks/[devicename]. First make sure, that AutoFS is installed. On Debian for example, it is installed like this:
Then create a file called /etc/auto.disks with the following lines therein:
Don't forget to chmod 755 /etc/auto.disks. This script will create an automounter map dynamically as soon as it passed a device node. It it finds it (e.g. while looking up /dev/sda1, which exists), it'll return the map to automount, which will cause the device node to be mounted. In my case, the script didn't need to be very sophisticated as I only have ext3-formatted disks, but it's easy to script it for automatic file system recognition. Btw, the script can be tested like this to see if it's actually working:
The first command returns the map for an existing device node /dev/sda1, while the second command returns nothing as /dev/sdx1 doesn't exist on the system. Now set AutoFS to use the executable map for /mnt/disks directory. Add this line to /etc/auto.master:
This will cause AutoFS to examine the executable map on all requested sub directories beneath /mnt/disks. So if you're going to access /mnt/disks/sda1, /mnt/disks/sda2, /mnt/disks/sdb1, /mnt/disks/sdc1, the block devices corresponding to the directories are mounted automatically -- as long as the devices exist of course. The timeout value designates after how much time (of inactivity) an automounted file system expires and get's unmounted. |
Powered by [ Universal Post Manager ] plugin. HTML saving format developed by gVectors Team www.gVectors.com |