Novell Cool Solutions: Automatically Mount USB Hard Drives
Wonko| Tue 08 September 2009
I wrote this one for [Novell Cool Solutions][]:
**Problem:**
USB HDDS are not automounted when no GNOME or KDE session is active in
SLES/SLED
**Solution:**
Seen working in: SUSE 10.1, SLES 10, SLED 10
OpenSuse 10.3 (see Update at end of Article)
This article describes how to set a fixed mount point for USB Hard
Drives and then automatically have them mounted when plugged in.
I tend to be a bit detailed (chatty if you must) there is a short
version of what you have to on the bottom of the page.
Recent SUSE systems rely on udev, hal and DBUS to automatically mount
Devices. Unfortunately the actual mount is only done if you are logged
in a Gnome (gnome-volume-manager) or KDE session. (see [SLED Release
Notes][])
But what if you want your drives to be automounted with another window
manager or no X at all? It's actually all there, the only thing missing
is a mount point and someone to do the mount.
**Here's my scenario:**
I've got a Notebook running as a little
backup/projects/playingaround-server running SLES 10. The book only has
about 40G of internal HDD space I added some USB HDD's to compensate.
Since some Services cannot find their data if it is not in the place
where they left it (stupid isn't it ;-) I needed the drives to be
mounted exactly the same every time they are plugged in, the server is
rebooted, etc.
To make the mount points for the USB drives persistent i added the
following lines to "/etc/fstab":
wzxhzdk:0
I chose to identify the partitions on the disk by Label
(LABEL=WORK-USB300). USB drives are actually linked to
"/dev/sd-something" device entries by udev. But the order in which they
appear is not always preserved. Someday udev might decide to use
"/dev/sda" for the drive you used to find under "/dev/sdb". I used yast
(system-\>Partitioner-\>...) to set the labels of my (ext3) partitions
but you could use "e2label" (ext2/3),"reiserfstune -l" or the like for
that.
I use the "auto" option in my fstab to be able to mount the drives with
"mount -a" wich is quite handy.
The "hotplug" option is important to be able to boot the system without
the usb drives attached. Without the "hotplug" option your system will
boot into the rescue console when the drives are not present.
The above is pretty low level. For the fancy stuff please "man fstab"
and "man mount".
So for now whenever i want my drives i plug them in and run "mount -a".
Happy?... not quite. I HAVE TO MANUALLY TYPE "mount -a". NO WAY, GRRR.
udev, the service doing all sorts of plugging in and out detection, was
already so kind to create a "/dev/sd-something" device for our USB HDD.
Why shouldn't it be able to ALSO mount them?
In /etc/udev/rules.d/ you will find several .rules files. This is what
udev does. Whenever it gets an event it runs through those rules and
applies them.
In case of a USB HDD it the rules in
"/etc/udev/rules.d/60-persistent-storage.rules" are the important ones.
The rule file numbering may be different. It is used to determine the
order of the rules.
To automatically run mount -a when a block device (HDD) is added, add a
file to the /etc/udev/rules.d/ directory.
**99-mount.rules:**
wzxhzdk:1
I called the file 99-something to make sure that the "mount" rule is run
after the /dev/sd-something device was created. Otherwise the drive
could not be there yet.
To activate the new rule do an "/etc/init.d/boot.udev restart" (or
"rcudev restart" where it exists).
To learn more about how to write rules for udev please consult:
