Automounting USB drives

I spent most of today getting FreeBSD to automount USB drives. I have several backup drives, some ntfs, others ext4, and some, for compatibility, fat...

My first attempt was to follow the FreeBSD handbook -- it has a section with step by step instructions for automounting. After a few minor issues (mostly with my brain), it worked, but it has a terminal flaw - I could not unmount drives. If ext4 is not unmounted cleanly, it would not automount again, and I would have to run over to my linux laptop in another room and fsck the drive. Sometimes unmounting would lock up the shell -- dmesg would show failed attempts to write to the drive...

Finally I searched the shitweb, and it seems that there are a couple of other solutions. Amazingly, there is a package called automount, confusing since I was already using /usr/sbin/automount... The other one is referred to as sysutils/automount. So I carefully commented out all the config files I worked so hard on earlier, and disabled the old automount.

sysutils/automount is much, much better. It installs as a single package (although after it installs it asks you to install fusefs-lkl, which brings with it 500MBs of linux for some reason, but I am getting used to that). It has a single config file.

A detour: FreeBSD creates the default user with id 1001, while linus, 1000, so I could not easily read the files off the mounted drive. I changed my user id to 1000 using pw, and was unable to sudo anymore. But after I logged out and logged in again, I was able to sudo and chown my home directory, and all was well.

sysutils/automount works like a charm, and even fscks dirty ext4 drives on plugin. I wish someone told me about it earlier.

Posted in: s/FreeBSD

🚀 stack

2023-10-07 · 7 months ago · 👍