Re: [gentoo-user] Automounting drives, partitions & udev, mtab & fstab

[Douglas Linford]

Alan,

Thank you for the explanation...some of this helps, I already knew about the
mount command. I have hal and dbus installed...what GUI tools for those apps
were you refering to?

douglas

On 2/5/07, Alan McKinnon <alan@××××××××××××××××.za> wrote:
>
> On Monday 05 February 2007, Douglas Linford wrote:
> > Alan,
> >
> >
> > Excuse the double post....
>
> You mean the top post? Please don't do that, on mailing lists it's
> considered rude
>
> > So...I am running Gnome 2.16.2   Is Gnome Volume Manager also
> > managing the drives and partitions I have?
>
> Yes
>
> > And then what creates the volume name that is displayed on the
> > desktop for that drive?
>
> Gnome VFS (Virtual File System) reads it from various possible places,
> like the file system label, or the disk drive description, or one of
> the USB attributes in the case of USB storage devices.
>
> What VFS us trying to do is find a sensible descriptor to display to you
> so you know what device it's talking about
>
> > In my example I have a USB external drive with a ext3 partition,
> > there is no listing in /etc/fstab for that partition, /etc/mtab lists
> > it as, /dev/sdc2 /media/disk, and on the desktop the icon for it
> > reads, 66.0 GB Volume. Where is that configured?
>
> It isn't configured anywhere to my knowledge, but I'm not a Gnome user
> and could be wrong.
>
> Let me explain how this works:
>
> The kernel knows about mount points and file systems. Somewhere it has a
> function that performs a mount, and user space programs use this
> function to accomplish the mount. One such program is "mount", which is
> configured via /etc/fstab and mtab as you point out. "mount" is a
> traditional program, been around for ages and we all know and love it.
> It's even suid so regular users can use it if root puts "user"
> or "users" in the options for a particular mount.
>
> "mount" is not the only way to mount stuff though. You can write any
> user space program you want, and call it whatever you feel like, to
> perform this system function called mounting. And you don't *have* to
> consider /etc/fstab when doing it either. Now, "mount" worked fine for
> years, but it all went belly up when pluggable storage devices came
> out. A user expects to insert a flash disk or camera and to see the
> files on it, and to not have to be root to do this. This effectively
> makes mount unsuitable for pluggable devices.
>
> So KDE and Gnome have figured out other ways to mount stuff, and lately
> the workable solutions have used hal to find devices and dbus to tell
> apps about the device, all nicely configurable with GUI tools. They
> don't use fstab either.
>
> You can cause interesting effects for yourself if you use an app like
> supermount from Mandriva and also use KDE automounting. Supermount
> modifies fstab, so this combination can result in the same device being
> mounted twice at the same time - entirely possible but seldom what you
> want :-)
>
> I hope this helps, and that I correctly judged what you needed to know.
> Now it's up to you to find the cute box to click to get the behaviour
> you want.
>
> alan
>
> --
> Optimists say the glass is half full,
> Pessimists say the glass is half empty,
> Developers say wtf is the glass twice as big as it needs to be?
>
> Alan McKinnon
> alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
> +27 82, double three seven, one nine three five
> --
> gentoo-user@g.o mailing list
>
>