Automounting A USB Drive

Home » CentOS » Automounting A USB Drive
CentOS 4 Comments

Hello,

Been try to use autofs to mount and unmount a usb flashdrive.

The mount point is /media

When the drive is NOT inserted, /media is empty. When Iinsert the drive, I see directories in /media that are on the usb drive but nocontent.

So, its kind working.

/etc/auto,master:

#
# Sample auto.master file
# This is a ‘master’ automounter map and it has thefollowing format:
# mount-point [map-type[,format]:]map [options]
# For details of the format look at auto.master(5).
#
/misc /etc/auto.misc
#
# NOTE: mounts done from a hosts map will be mounted withthe
# “nosuid”and “nodev” options unless the “suid” and “dev”
# optionsare explicitly given.
#
/net -hosts
#
# Include /etc/auto.master.d/*.autofs
# The included files must conform to the format of thisfile.
#
+dir:/etc/auto.master.d
#
# Include central master map if it can be found using
# nsswitch sources.
#
# Note that if there are entries for /net or /misc (as
# above) in the included master map any keys that are the
# same will not be seen as the first read key seen takes
# precedence.
#
+auto.master

/media /etc/auto.usb

/etc/auto.usb:

usb -fstype=auto :/dev/sdb1

The particular usb drive is a REAR backup drive but Iused -fstype=auto in case it may be something different.

TIA

4 thoughts on - Automounting A USB Drive

  • I’ve never had to do anything at all to make this work,… I insert the USB device, wait a few seconds, and voila!

    are you trying this because you can’t get it to work the “normal” way, or is this simply an educational experience?

    Fred

  • Seems a permission issue. su to root after the “auto” mount and take a look. If you can see your file or can write a touch file then your user may not be in the necessary owner/group to view/write to the structure. Seen similar problems in upgrades… same user but the UID changed in the upgrade and blinded the current user to older files that were preserved. A
    simple chmod command from root fixed the issue to restore proper ownership. Just a wag, but sometimes it’s the little things.

    — Fred

  • look. be in A

    Let me add this which I failed to mention.

    This was a fresh install as a “Server with Desktop”. I have been adding packages as needed.

    Week before last when working on this, I was looking through the logs and found REAR need syslinux which wasn’t installed. I may not have all the packages installed I need. I run REAR as a cron job around 2AM. If I did a reboot/restart and forgot to manually mount the USB drive or forgot to click on it gnom, which is usually the case, I don’t get a backup.

    It ran last night and I was OK, but I’d still need to find out why its not mounting by itself.

    Thanks