automount?

Dmitri Nikulin dnikulin at gmail.com
Mon Jun 12 00:40:38 PDT 2006


On 6/12/06, Yury Tarasievich <yury.tarasievich at xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
What would it take to implement auto-mounting, at least of removables, in dfbsd?

E.g., the approach which suse-10.0 takes is very handy in that
respect. You just insert your media and up it goes, without any
further intervention on users's side. And one can just eject the CD at
will without fuss.
That's a lot better than Scientific Linux (a RedHat/Fedora derivative
used at my university). Insert any device, and the directory based on
its volume name will be created... but it won't actually contain
anything. Remove the device without explicit unmount and the machine
will panic. Decent (30%) chance of an unbootable system due to ext3
corruption (so much for journalling).
For reference, there's an amd (AutoMountDaemon) which 'solves'
automounting with an automated NFS export. It's not magic but good
enough. Beyond that, I've heard good things about what Solaris does.
In *any* case there are inherent dangers.
Hasn't this been discussed at length before? I remember the conclusion
being that the framework within BSDs don't handle filesystem backends
vanishing cleanly, and that this means removal of devices which are
mounted would have to be handled very strangely.
 -- Dmitri Nikulin





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