I guess I should have written that the file systems on the other end of the
firewire and USB are both vfat, so the label= method will not work. (Unless
one can label vfat or use some other identifier in a FAT file system?) The
firewire holds a traditional DOS extended partition, which I guess is why it
comes in at /dev/sd?5. The USB houses a primary partition and it appears at
/dev/sda1.
I played around with updfstab and could not get anything to happen there. The
format of the updfstab.conf file is pretty simple. (Actually it should be in
/etc/updfstab.conf.default). On a hunch, I coded the following stanza -
device fireext {
partition 1
match hd "sda5"
symlink true
}
And in /etc/fstab I had -
/mnt/fireext /u0 vfat rw,umask=0000,auto,kudzu
The intent was to get updfstab to mount the vfat partition at either /u0 or at
/mnt/fireext. But it didn't happen. It didn't like the partition argument
and it didn't find a device called fireext, which I thought was only supposed
to be a pseudo-device name.
As to your question regarding hot-disconnecting Firewire devices, the only
answer I can give is that I don't do it. I always power down into suspend or
off before removing the card, a PCMCIA card. In any case, I don't think
updfstab will run when you hot-connect the device; you may have to run it by
hand.
And funny you should ask about kernel 18.9. I just up2date'd it today and ran
into some problems with an NTFS file system - yea, I am kind of a nut when it
comes to file systems and disks! - so I backed off temporarily and am running
13.9. I did notice once or twice that the system locked up writing large
amounts of data (>10GB) to the Firewire, but it hasn't happened since.
I am thinking now I will just have to cook up something to run in the rc
scripts that will test for and mount filesystems at /u0 and /u1. I sure
would like something a bit more elegant though.
Rgds,
~>jc ** jeffrey w comer
On Thursday 05 June 2003 03:41, "D. D. Brierton" <darren at dzr-web.com>
wrote:
> I've been looking into this too, and at the moment I'm not sure. One
> possibility is to label the partitions on the external drives if that's
> possible, and then in /etc/fstab instead of having the first item on the
> line be /dev/sda1 it can be LABEL=<your_label>.
>
> Another possibility, which is the direction I would prefer to go in, is
> to write a recipe for each drive in /etc/updfstab.conf and have kudzu
> and updfstab add the appropriate lines to /etc/fstab on boot up. The
> trouble with the latter method is that I'm not sure if it works for
> hot-pugging the drives, or if you have to fiddle with hotplug stuff as
> well. (Do kudzu and updfstab get called only at boot, or do they also do
> their stuff when drives are connected and diconnected?) Also, I'm not
> really sure where to start with writing the recipes for
> /etc/updfstab.conf.
>
> As you're using external drives yourself and I've only just bought my
> external FireWire drive, can I ask you a couple of questions? What is
> the appropriate way to disconnect these devices? Is unmounting them and
> then pulling the lead out sufficient, or are you meant to run some kind
> of hotplug script before pulling the cable out? (And similarly for
> connecting them to an already running machine.)
>
> Also, has kernel-2.4.20-18.9 caused you any problems with your FireWire
> drive? Mine won't work with 2.4.20-18.9 but works just fine with
> 2.4.20-13.9 (I've posted a bug report: 92193).
>
> Best, Darren
