I got a CentOS 5.3 fileserver machine (no monitor/kb/mouse).
I'd like to "pair" it with a specific USB drive, so that when this USB drive is connected and mounted it would start a backup - just a simple cp /source /target will do for now - it's the "autorun on mounted a specific USB drive" part I can't really solve.
Is there an elegant way to do this some sort of autorun? My only really rough idea to do it is to check if the USB drive is available with a script run in crontab every minute :-\

Cheers!

There certainly is ...

udev-rules & script tied in.


Cheers,
Tink

may be it is time to forget usb storage and use a cloud storage service, such as Dropbox.

Thanks! This seems to be just what I want. I suppose I'll soon be good friends with dmesg and this doc http://www.reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html

The cloud... Well, in this case I want to backup photos (about 15GB so far, and rapidly growing), and I honestly don't trust the cloud as a source of backup. I'd rather go the "backup buddy"-way, than the cloud in this case to be honest.

Yeah - good read; slightly dated, I'm afraid. udevinfo isn't
around any more. But a google for udevadm & serial should get
you on the right track. If I still had the command in roots
bash_history I would have posted it - but I don't ;}


Cheers,
Tink

I have some trouble getting this to work. My target machine has CentOS 5.4, but it doesn't have the udevadm command. So I tried to do the developing on a Fedora 13 laptop.
I thought that it would be nice not to change any mountpoints or such. Gnome always mounts the USB disk as /media/BackupDisk anyway. So I created a /etc/udev/rules.d/98-local.rules (I've tried to name it 10-local.rules too) that looks like this:
KERNEL=="sd?1", SUBSYSTEMS=="scsi", ATTRS{"serial"}=="00E0010575A18", RUN+="/etc/udev/backup"

I've tried some variants of above too (like)
DRIVERS=="usb", SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{"serial"}=="00E0010575A18", RUN+="/etc/udev/backup"

After each change I ran:
udevadm control --reload-rules
The unplugged the usb cord, waited a few sec, and then replugged it.

The file /etc/udev/backup (permission 755) has been reduced to a bare minimum to se if it runs (which it doesn't):
#!/bin/bash
touch /tmp/zzzz

Still nothing How do I go about debuging this? Or is there an obvious blooper above?

Cheers,

I found my mistake. It's supposed to be ATTRS{serial} w/o quotationmarks. I also removed the KERNEL bit and changed SUBSYSTEMS to "usb". Just to keep it in the same hierarchy level. Dunno if it makes a difference, but it works now.

BR,
mr_minning

Well done, and thanks for sharing your findings with the community.


Cheers,
Tink