Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!news-res.gsl.net!news.gsl.net!news.uoregon.edu!news.rediris.es!sanson.dit.upm.es!ioda!jmrueda From: jmrueda@diatel.upm.es (Javier Martin Rueda ) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Anything like Solaris's volume management? Date: 3 Jul 1996 13:23:35 GMT Organization: Dpt. Ing. Telematica Lines: 31 Message-ID: <4rds8n$o36@sanson.dit.upm.es> References: <4r1iq3$h2d@oink.cs.utexas.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: ioda.diatel.upm.es Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] > I was wondering if FreeBSD offered anything similar to vold on Solaris > (e.g. automatically mount CD-ROMs and theoretically other things when > they are inserted into the drive)? I don't know of anything similar, and I'm interested in it. If you get information, please let me know too (unless it is posted here, of course). Some time ago I sort of solved this by using the amd automounter (shipped with FreeBSD). The automounter will automatically mount a filesystem when you access a given directory. It will unmount it when a certain time of inactivity elapses. It is primarily meant for NFS mounted filesystems, but it lets you manage any kind of filesystem, so that I configured it to mount the CD-ROM, or the floppy, when any user accessed certain directories. However, it's imperfect in comparison to the volume manager (of course, it is not designed for the same task). I found the following two problems: I configured the automounter to mount the CD-ROM on /cdrom, but the directory to which I had to access (chdir) to mount the CD-ROM was /a/cdrom, which is a symbolic link to /cdrom. I couldn't find a way to make both directories the same (which doesn't mean there isn't, maybe I didn't read the instructions properly). That means it is not as transparent as the volume manager. To eject the CD-ROM, you have to wait first until it is unmounted when the inactivity timer expires. You can set a short timer, although that may cause the CD-ROM to be unmounted too early in some cases. The volume manager is better, because the CD-ROM is mounted permanently until you explicitly require to unmount it; in that moment, it is unmounted and ejected at once.