What is the service that's responsible for automounting a USB drive in CentOS 6.4?

Question

I know of the legacy Linux way of mounting a USB stick or drive: mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/

But in some CentOS 6.x installations I saw, you just insert the USB stick and CentOS automagically mounts it, to /media/<VOLUMENAME>

This auto-sense must be handled by some kind of a daemon/service, right?

What is the name of that service and how do I find it using the /sbin/service command?

Solution

As others have commented I don't believe this is possible in runlevel3. The application in question under GNOME 2.x is called gnome-volume-manager. You can reconfigure it a bit using gnome-volume-properties.

screenshot

            

Given 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

gome-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

Comments

[Gilles 'SO- stop being evil']

What desktop environment are you running?

[Hampus]

@Gilles I am not running any desktop. My CentOS 6.4 based server boots to runlevel 3 and stays there. I am basically facing ae problem similar to the one described here.

[slm]

I believe the daemon that's automounting is part of the desktop, when in runlevel 3 this facility won't be available.

[slm]

If you're system is running in runlevel3 you most likely don't have any of the Desktop RPMs installed.

[slm]

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: unix.stackexchange.com/a/9067/7453. Do a yum search gnome-disk-utility*

[Hampus]

Wow. If I had 4 more points I would've upvoted you. But for now I can only accept. Thank you!

[slm]

Youre quite welcome. Glad I was able to help you out. Good luck!