Automounting an USB disk

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Automounting an USB disk
started by: talcite

Posted by talcite on May 23 2008,03:22

Hi Everyone,

I know what the view on automounting drives is in the forum, but I have a rather exceptional circumstance.

I'm building a picture frame for my grandmother which has no network connection.

The requirements that need to be met are:
-No user interaction whatsoever. She isn't literate so typing anything, even aliases, is completely out of the question. The picture frame will not have a keyboard to minimize size anyways. No network means SSH is also not doable. (I can connect a wire for maintenance purposes.)
-Pictures are loaded onto the frame with a USB key. The hard drive is a 2g CF to IDE card, so not much space to store photos. Ideally, I'd also try to keep read/write access to the CF minimized to prolong life.
-I have a relative that can add/swap photos on the USB drive every now and then . There is no keyboard or mouse though, so typing is not doable.

Based on the requirements, I've come to the conclusion that automounting a flash drive is the only feasable way to set up this system. If you have other ideas, please don't hesitate to voice them.

I have been trying to refrain from recompiling the kernel with supermount, but instead adding a bash script to hotplug. Supermount seems like overkill for my application. Feh will be accessing the drive all the time, so it might not be able to unmount anyways.

My question is this: What is the implementation of hotplug currently used in DSL? What gets executed, what doesn't? Is the hotplug system even active? I've tried putting a bash script in usb.agent but it didn't work.

Has anyone tried this approach before?

Thanks in advance for your replies.

Posted by Jason W on May 23 2008,03:49

I have my server automount my drives and export them, and I just added the commands to /opt/bootlocal.sh. If it were me, I would put in that file the command "mount /dev/sda1" to mount the usb drive. If simply mounting the drive automatically on boot is what you want to do, that would do it.