How to automatically mount an USB device on plugin-time on an already running system?

Question

I know how to use /etc/fstab to automatically mount devices on boot or when doing sudo mount -a, which works perfectly fine. For example, here is my current line for my device

UUID=B864-497A /media/usbstick vfat defaults,users,noatime,nodiratime,umask=000 0 0

How do I achieve automatic mounting when this USB device with known UUID is plugged in while the system is already running, so that I don't have to run sudo mount -a after it is plugged in?

Additional info: I'm working on an up-to-date console-only Debian wheezy linux.

Solution 1

I use the usbmount package to automount USB drives on my Ubuntu server install. I have confirmed that the package exists for Wheezy too. Recently also added for Jessie.

sudo apt-get install usbmount  

usbmount will automount hfsplus, vfat, and ext (2, 3, and 4) file systems. You can configure it to mount more/different file systems in /etc/usbmount/usbmount.conf. By default it mounts these file systems with the sync,noexec,nodev,noatime,nodiratime options, however this can also be changed in the aforementioned configuration file.

usbmount also supports custom mount options for different file system types and custom mountpoints.

Solution 2

You could use gnome-volume-manager to automount. You can reconfigure it a bit using gnome-volume-properties.

screenshot

            

If you're in runlevel 3 I don't believe this is an option. You could however coax udev into doing the mounting for you in a similar fashion.

1. add a file automount.rules in /etc/udev/rules.d

2. add the following lines to automount.rules

automount.rules

# automounting usb flash drives
# umask is used to allow every user to write on the stick
# we use --sync in order to enable physical removing of mounted memory sticks -- this is OK for fat-based sticks
# I don't automount sda since in my system this is the internal hard drive
# depending on your hardware config, usb sticks might be other devices than sdb*
ACTION=="add",KERNEL=="sdb*", RUN+="/usr/bin/pmount --sync --umask 000 %k"
ACTION=="remove", KERNEL=="sdb*", RUN+="/usr/bin/pumount %k"
ACTION=="add",KERNEL=="sdc*", RUN+="/usr/bin/pmount --sync --umask 000 %k"
ACTION=="remove", KERNEL=="sdc*", RUN+="/usr/bin/pumount %k"

3. reload the udev rules:

udevadm control --reload-rules

gnome-disk-utility

I found the new name of gnome-volume-manager BTW. It's called gnome-disk-utility in CentOS6, I just confirmed that that RPM is in the default yum repos.

This U&L Q lead me to it: USB storage devices aren't automatically mounted when inserted on a fresh install of Debian 6.0.

Do the following command to find it:

$ yum search gnome-disk-utility*
gnome-disk-utility-devel.i686 : Development files for gnome-disk-utility-libs
gnome-disk-utility-devel.x86_64 : Development files for gnome-disk-utility-libs
gnome-disk-utility-ui-devel.i686 : Development files for gnome-disk-utility-ui-libs
gnome-disk-utility-ui-devel.x86_64 : Development files for gnome-disk-utility-ui-libs
gnome-disk-utility.x86_64 : Disk management application
gnome-disk-utility-libs.i686 : Shared libraries used by Palimpsest
gnome-disk-utility-libs.x86_64 : Shared libraries used by Palimpsest
gnome-disk-utility-ui-libs.i686 : Shared libraries used by Palimpsest
gnome-disk-utility-ui-libs.x86_64 : Shared libraries used by Palimpsest

References

• automounting usb flash drives on linux with udev and pmount

Solution 3

Because I couldn't find the above GUI tool from my repository, I instead found this,

which at least shows when something is plugged in and provides an easy and fairly smart way to mount it by selecting it and clicking the play button.

Comments

[Seth]

By How do I achieve automatic mounting when this USB device with known UUID is plugged in do you mean you only want to automount this specific USB drive? Or does it matter? I've gone ahead an posted a more generic answer that will automatically mount most USB storage devices, but I am not entirely sure this is what you want.

[Skyler]

@Seth I have a specific USB stick which I use for quickly transferring files between the Debian device and other devices (sometimes granting network access for these devices is to much work if you only want to transfer a tiny file quickly).

[Pang Ying]

after installing this it did start auto-mounting drives again but I don't seem to have access rights as my user, making it needlessly painful to copy files. Would you expect I'd have to edit the config mentioned to achieve this or is it likely to be something else? My machine has just been crippled by some updates - i had to shutdown on the command line previously but now it wont work with my usb... also just lost my graphics drivers so my desktop looks like windows 3.1 or something! :( not been a good week for my computer

[Seth]

@Jonny You didn't mention what distribution you were running but if it has a GUI it should auto-mount drives by default. It sounds like what you are experiencing is part of a bigger, different problem; especially if other things started behaving oddly too.

[Pang Ying]

yeah possibly. I've been neglecting it for a while. I'm on debian using xfce. I might post a question on here

[Hritik Arora]

To which folder it mounts?!

[Seth]

@IvanBorisenko On Debian based systems it will usually mount to /media/user/.

[Ernie]

I tried this myself, only to find that it doesn't support NTFS well (or really, at all), so I formatted my disk as VFAT and all is well now.

[ccpizza]

Is there a way to force usbmount to use volume lables as mount points rather than usb1, usb2, usb3...?

[Rolf]

usbmount is unmaintained, latest release: 2007.

[Seth]

@Rolf Still seems to work fine :)

[Wowfunhappy]

This package does not appear to exist for Stretch. Is their a newer alternative?