I have an external USB drive, which interacts as my backup and media file system. Very often I switch off this hard drive, because of energy savings. But after enabling I have to mount manually this drive. Furthermore my Samba server access to that and from my other Linux working stations I also have to manually mount the Samba accounts. After sometime I was really nerved. That's why I tried to add the USB drive and my Samba accounts to the fstab files. But after a switch off the USB drive they wasn't be reconnected. So I looked for another solution and I found one. The AutoFS daemon solved my problem. Below I describe how to install and configure the AutoFS feature. It's very easy.
First you have to install the autofs package (e.g. Ubuntu):
sudo apt-get install autofs
Second you edit the /etc/auto.master file:
# absolute directory for mounting and # dedicated configuration file path /media /etc/autofs/auto.media --timeout=5
Last you add your USB drive to the auto.media file:
# relative mount directory, file system type, further options # dev path BackupAndFiles -fstype=ext3,rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks :/dev/sdb1
That's all. The same way works for another file systems.
Regards
Rafael Sobek
Just install dbus/hal and you do not need to ever automount anything again