Re: [gentoo-user] USB auto mounting

[daid kahl]

> Using Windowmaker with Thunar as a file manager, with the volume manager
> in place and that plugin is enabled.
>
> For some reason Thunar is now not seeing any USB device when plugged
> in. I am not sure when this stopped working.
>
> My USB devices of keyboard, trackball, and webcam are working fine.
> If I "lsusb" I can see the flash drive listed when inserted.
>
> I have tried re-emerging various items hoping that it would bring it
> back to life. Obviously no luck since I am posting.
>
> Would anyone have any ideas on a possible cause and cure?

I'm also using xfce & thunar, but I've not setup any auto-mounting
yet.  So, I don't have any wisdom on the ground of getting back your
old functionality.

However, there is a reasonable alternative solution that might be more
elegant, and also not dependent on your desktop, which is to use udev.
 Generally speaking, for my approach here, this isn't good for
automounting any random device.  However, for your standard devices,
you can do things like collecting the usb serial number.

The upside of this (and the reason I use it), is that for your
standard USB storage devices, you can mount each one uniquely to any
specified mount point.  This is useful for things like backup to USB
harddisk that you want mounted to the same point for, in my case,
rsnapshot.  (This is otherwise more difficult, since automounting
without serial ID will just take the first usb drive connected and
mount it somewhere in /media usually.)

My usb camera is also mounted in such a manner, so that will also
work.  I assume a keyboard could be done likewise.

In case this route is of interest, I will syndicate parts of a post I
made to the list in October:

To get the serial of a device, for this example, the device node
/dev/sdb (which might be a USB key considered as a SATA drive here):

# udevadm info -a -p $(udevadm info -q path -n /dev/sdb) | grep ATTRS{serial}

You might get more than one return on this command.  Us the first
serial, and it is also the one without colons or periods, just numbers
and letters.

I include my own configuration files.  The .rules config files should
go into /etc/udev/rules.d and the scripts should be made executable
and go under /etc/udev/scripts/

For a harddrive, then, you can make the directory in /mnt and put it into fstab

/dev/cyclops		/mnt/cyclops	ext3		rw,users		0 0

The system will complain on boot that it can't find the drive if it's
not attached, but it won't do any harm as it's just a warning.

PLEASE NOTE: For udev rules, each *new line* is considered as a *new
rule*, thus for the same device, make sure there are no carriage
returns.  This could happen if you were Googling your hardware for
udev rules and copy-pasting the udev rules from a web-browser (as not
all sites will properly handle the carriage returns).

Hope this helps, even if it is an alternative solution and doesn't
tell you what happened to your system or why.

~daid