Date: Wed, 1 Nov 1995 21:39:18 -0600 (CST) From: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com> To: lyndon@orthanc.com (Lyndon Nerenberg VE7TCP) Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Automounting CD-ROMs Message-ID: <199511020339.VAA11913@brasil.moneng.mei.com> In-Reply-To: <199511020028.QAA26005@multivac.orthanc.com> from "Lyndon Nerenberg VE7TCP" at Nov 1, 95 04:28:44 pm
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> Are any of you familiar with the Irix 'mediad' daemon? It's main > purpose in life is to handle the CDROM automount scenario being > discussed. The program refers to a config file listing the devices > to be scanned, and probes them periodically (I think every five > seconds) to look for media insertion. If a CDROM appears, and if it > contains a recognized filesystem, the filesystem is mounted automatically > at a location also specified in the config file. It locks the device > to prevent a front-panel ejection of the media. Graceful unmount and > eject is handled by the 'eject' command. What little I've played with this, I was very impressed with it - it consistently behaved in a way that conformed to my idea of what "principle of least suprise" would be, and worked consistently and reliably. This is UNlike Sun's volume manager, which is horrid at best and unspeakable at worst. If you are lucky enough to be able to get it to mount a CD-ROM, pray you can get it unmounted, without vold getting confused, and leaving all sorts of stray stale NFS file handles all over. God forbid you might want to mount a floppy. I was always amused that vold's handling of floppies is so atrocious that Sun's own products (WABI) disable it. Um, of course my opinions are my own and in no way reflect the opinions of my employer ;-) > The downside is that 'eject' requires root priv's. If you have a > public workstation environment you would want the console user to > be able to remove the media they inserted. Determining the class > "console user" in a windowing environment could be problematic. > Then again, the public workstation scenario usually sees the workstation > configured to deny remote logins, so it probably doesn't matter. > > Just more food for thhought. The AMD scenario seems needlessly complex. I must have missed the AMD scenario. However, I do have AMD handle mounting of FFS filesystems that are not automatically mounted at boot, and aside from the fact that I have to manually stick in a "fsck -y /dev/xyzzzzz" in rc.local it works great. Now all I have to do is figure out a quick hack that allows me to do the equivalent of a "fsck -p /dev/xyzzzzz"... Sorry, that's a bit off track. Point being, it might be possible to make it work - it's a not entirely dissimilar scenario. Never tried CD's though. ;-) ... Joe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joe Greco - Systems Administrator jgreco@ns.sol.net Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI 414/342-4847
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