Hello guys, I need some help with a problem I'm having.

I am running a StepMania computer that is dedicated to StepMania. StepMania has support to play custom songs off of a USB flash drive. I'm using a bare-bones CentOS 5.2 install.

Therefore, I need to be able to mount a flash drive as soon as someone puts it in and unmount it when they take it out (when they are done playing). Also, I need the mount location to be consistent. P1's flash drive mounts at /media/playeroneflashdrive, for instance. When they take the flash drive out, /media/playeroneflashdrive is unmounted so that the next person's flash drive is mounted there. Ditto for P2.

I've tried this with IVMan, and I've got it to the point where it'll automount, but it doesn't unmount automatically, so I don't think that will work...

Any ideas? (A.K.A. tell me how to do it so I can steal it. )

No, really. Any help is appreciated.

I don't think what you want is really possible, because there's no way for the system to know to run the unmount command until after the drive is removed--at which point its too late. If there's still data in the write buffer at the time then you're sure to get some kind of corruption. That's why it's always recommended that you manually unmount the drive before you remove it, i.e. with the "safely remove" option.

The automounting systems I've seen that do have auto-unmounting actually rely on a time-out mechanism; flush the buffers and unmount the drive if it hasn't been accessed in X seconds, then remount it if it's accessed again. I'm not sure if you can do this with ivman, but it might be possible, perhaps with some kind of monitoring script or something.

I'd suggest rather that you create a very visible and easy-to-use "Unmount The Drive" button or something and make sure that all users understand that they have to use it or risk corrupting their data.

there is a
daemon for gnome that automount usb pendrives

the best is the one for suse kde for that also create the ids in /etc/fstab
so that all is done automatically


to unmount that is the problem, since the pc never knows when you wanna trigger the umount:
here could be an idea to use a infrared usb in the box, the guy click on the remote control and it unmount it
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...807/page3.html

or with sphinx voice control, you talk to you mic, and it'll umount the pendrive
you can say
"umount my pendrive"
and it makes it !
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeVoiceControl
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCSgkUnlGGA

it isnt that complicated if some talented guys help you

to unmount that is the problem, since the pc never knows when you wanna trigger the umount:
here could be an idea to use a infrared usb in the box, the guy click on the remote control and it unmount it
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...807/page3.html

or with sphinx voice control, you talk to you mic, and it'll umount the pendrive
you can say
"umount my pendrive"
and it makes it !
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeVoiceControl
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCSgkUnlGGA

it isnt that complicated if some talented guys help you

Exactly what I said. Both your suggestions and mine essentially do the same thing. Whatever the technique you use, the computer has to somehow be told to run the umount command before the drive is physically removed. And that requires either manual intervention, some kind of timer-based solution, or perhaps some other consistent event that can be used as a triggering mechanism, such when the user shuts down the program that accesses the drive.