autmount/unmount USB drives

[HaJo Schatz]

On Sun, 9 Jan 2005, Emre CELEBI wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Im trying to administer a Fedora 2 box and have some difficulties with automount service. I hope some of the linux gurus can help me with this annoying problem.
>
> I have configured autofs to mount my usb drives automatically when its plugged in and put an idle time 4 seconds for the auto-unmount option.
>
> The problem is even if the automount option with autofs works correctly when i plug in the usb, it seems it does not aouto-unmount the usb even if i un-plug it after 10 seconds. mount command shows that my usb is still mounted with the specified autofs mount directory even if the usb is not connected!.

In general, I believe it's not a very good idea to use automount for these 
devices. You can't be certain of the device point the stick will get 
(eg /dev/sda1), so automount might not hit the right point. FC3 is here 
far better with it's HAL option.

For your problem however, there might be a process still accessing your 
drive, preventing automount from unmounting it (Gnome loves to do this, 
which is why these devices, for FC2, usually had to be unmounted with 
"umount -l"). See "man lsof" to debug this...

HaJo

-- 
HaJo Schatz <hajo at hajo.net>
http://www.HaJo.Net

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