Auto-mount Service for Systems with No Desktop

Auto-mount uses udisks to monitor and respond to block-device related events, such as USB or optical drive insertion/removal, partition mounting/unmounting, and more.

Out of the box, auto-mount will automatically mount any block device containing a filesystem, when it appears in the system.

Configuration

Auto-mount actions are controlled by config files, which are plain-text INI-style files with .conf extension, consisting of section names (enclosed in []) followed by actions to be performed.

Config files are located in the /etc/automount/ directory (typically) and are parsed in alphabetical order. Actions in the most recent config files override the ones in earlier files.

Here is an example of the default config file that comes with auto-mount:

/etc/automount/10-default.conf:

[ID_FS_USAGE=filesystem]
auto-mount = yes

And, here is an example of a file overriding the default action for a specific drive:

/etc/automount/20-override.conf:

[ID_FS_UUID=E428-616E]
auto-mount = no

Sections and Properties

Section names consist of one or more space-delimited match conditions, which can have one of the following forms:

property=value, !property=value, property or !property

The first two forms match on equality and inequality respectively, while the last two match on the presence or absence of a certain property.

Values in match conditions can contain wild-card characters, such as:

*, ?, [abc] or [!def]

Here is an example of a section that will match optical media containing a filesystem:

20-optical.conf:

[ID_FS_USAGE=filesystem ID_CDROM]
on-unmount = /bin/eject ${DEVNAME}

and will eject the media once it's unmounted.

Another example of a section, which will cause UDF filesystems on non-optical drives to be mounted with different options:

20-vfat.conf:

[ID_FS_TYPE=udf !ID_TYPE=cd]
mount-options = uid=1000,gid=1000

You can obtain a list of all properties for a given block device using udevadm:

user@linux:~$ udevadm info -q env /dev/sr0

DEVPATH=/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb3/3-8/3-8:1.0/host0/target0:0:0/0:0:0:0/block/sr0
DEVNAME=/dev/sr0
DEVTYPE=disk
MAJOR=11
MINOR=0
SUBSYSTEM=block
...
ID_CDROM=1
ID_BUS=usb
ID_MODEL=BD-RE_BU40N
ID_TYPE=cd
ID_USB_DRIVER=usb-storage
...
ID_FS_UUID=d042881731342041
ID_FS_LABEL=FROM_RUSSIA_WITH_LOVE
ID_FS_TYPE=udf
ID_FS_USAGE=filesystem
...

or:

user@linux:~$ udevadm info -q env /dev/sda1

DEVPATH=/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:0d.0/usb2/2-1/2-1:1.0/host0/target0:0:0/0:0:0:0/block/sda/sda1
DEVNAME=/dev/sda1
DEVTYPE=partition
PARTN=1
MAJOR=8
MINOR=1
SUBSYSTEM=block
...
ID_BUS=usb
ID_MODEL=STORAGE_DEVICE
ID_TYPE=disk
ID_USB_DRIVER=usb-storage
...
ID_PART_TABLE_UUID=d526b372
ID_PART_TABLE_TYPE=dos
ID_FS_LABEL=TEMP
ID_FS_UUID=E428-616E
ID_FS_VERSION=FAT32
...
ID_FS_TYPE=vfat
ID_FS_USAGE=filesystem
...

When a block-device event occurs, auto-mount extracts actions from all sections with matching conditions, with actions in later sections overriding the ones in earlier sections.

Actions

An action can be any of the following:

auto-mount = yes|no
mount-options = ...
mount-as = [user][:group]

on-mount = ...
on-unmount = ...
on-add = ...
on-remove = ...
on-change = ...

where ... represents a command to be executed when the action is triggered. For example:

50-spin-down.conf:

[ID_TYPE=cd]
# set spin-down time to 20 minutes
on-add = /sbin/hdparm -S 240 ${DEVNAME}

Commands support basic variable substitution in the form ${VARIABLE}, where VARIABLE can be any of the device properties.

Additionally, the on-mount and on-unmount actions can use the ${MOUNT_POINT} property to determine the current mount point.

Note: The same block device can be mounted at multiple mount points, and the on-mount and on-unmount actions will be executed for each mount point.

The mount-options and mount-as values are only applicable when auto-mount = yes.

Share and enjoy.

Authors

• Dimitry Ishenko - dimitry (dot) ishenko (at) (gee) mail (dot) com

License

This project is distributed under the GNU GPL license. See the LICENSE.md file for details.