udev and USB devices - FC3

[Anton Markov]

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Francois Ouellette wrote:
| Hello,
|
| One my desktop running Fedora 3 when I insert a thumb drive in a USB port
| it gets automatically recognized and mounted with an entry in fstab
| /dev/sda1 on /media/LEXAR_MEDIA type vfat
|      (rw,nosuid,nodev,sync,noatime,iocharset=utf8,user=xxx)

'/etc/fstab' doesn't actualy mount anything on it's own. Most likely
there is a hotplug script which gets executed every time the thumbdrive
is inserted and does the mounting for you.

|
| But on my laptop nothing happens when I insert the thumb drive in any of
| the USB ports, so I am trying to add entries in a file in
| /etc/udev/rules.d but I am not sure what's needed.

Once again, UDEV is not responsible for mounting anything. It simply
creates or removes device nodes (files in '/dev'). You stated below that
/dev/sda and /dev/sda1 are already being created, so UDEV is not the
problem here.

|
| Those entries get created when the (laptop) system starts:
|
| /proc/bus/usb/001/001
| /proc/bus/usb/001/002
| /proc/bus/usb/001/003
| /proc/bus/usb/002/001
| /proc/bus/usb/002/003
|
| as well as /dev/sda and /dev/sda1
|
| Also fstab contains:
| usbfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw)

'usbfs' is the filesystem that contains information about USB devices
connected to the system (such as '/proc/bus/usb/001/001' above). It has
nothing to do with mounting the actual devices.

|
| so it looks like there is only a little bit missing...
|

I am not sure if/how the desktop auto-detected the thumb drive (I am not
~ an Fedora user), but I know Redhat used to have a hardware detection
utility called 'kudzu' which you could try running on the laptop (I am
assuming your laptop runs FC3, since you didn't say otherwise).

Otherwise, here is the manual route:
1) copy the lines related to the thumb drive from your desktop (the ones
you posted above) into your laptop's /etc/fstab. That should at least
let you mount the thumb drive manually
2) As far as automounting it goes, you have several choices:
- - Try looking in /etc/hotplug on your desktop for any usb-related
scripts your laptop may be missing (I don't know how hotplug works on FC3)
- - Forget about hotplug and use automount/autofs. This is my favourite
option, since automount will also unmount your filesystems when they are
not in use, so you can remove the drive without issuing an unmount
command (after waiting for it to unmount).

I hope this gets you on the right track; sorry I can't be more helpful.

- --
Anton Markov <("anton" + "@" + "truxtar" + "." + "com")>

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