disable supermount/magicdev/kudzu or whatever

cbonar · 12-03-2004, 07:11 AM

Hi.

(It's a bit long, but the important terms are in bold and italic :-)

I'm hardly trying to find a convenient way to plug/unplug my USB key with Mandrake 10.1 CE.
I have successfully patched mount so it can recognize UUID and LABEL on vfat (which is my key's filesystem) : http://castet.matthieu.free.fr/downl...-2.12pre.patch.
So, my /etc/fstab entry is the following :

Code:

UUID=41975015-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 /mnt/usbgirl vfat exec,umask=0077,user,iocharset=iso8859-15,sync,codepage=850,noauto,noatime,users 0 0

which works quite well (except that I have a problem unmounting as a user, but this is not the point).

Now, the problem : it seems that a mad process is running on my computer : some people use to call it supermount, magicdev, kudzu or other pernicious names... This process inserts and modifies entries in my /etc/fstab !!!!

Here's how the previous line looks like after the hurricane :

Code:

/dev/UUID=41975015-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 /mnt/usbgirl vfat exec,umask=0077,user,iocharset=iso8859-15,sync,codepage=850,noauto,noatime,users 0 0

Note the new /dev/ prefix to my entry. Of course, mount /mnt/usbgirl doesn't work anymore.

I have first thought about using the full command :

Code:

mount -U 41975015-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 -t vfat -o exec,umask=0077,user,iocharset=iso8859-15,sync,codepage=850,noauto,noatime,users /mnt/usbgirl

but only root can do that (it told me).
I'm ok to disable the automount feature (even if kudzu is very usefull at launch time), but how to do that ?

please... help...

theYinYeti · 12-03-2004, 07:41 AM

Actually, I think it is hotplug that is bugging you.

Supermount is a kernel add-on, that, when active, will automatically mount your device if a media is there, and umount it when it is not there anymore. It is usefull, but IMO it should not be used with writable media (and before anyone says "but in Windows it works", I'll answer no it does not: in windows you can destroy a filesystem on a writable removable media if you're not carefull).

MagicDev is a user tool, that regularly scans the CD device when it is not mounted, and take appropriate action when a media is inserted; that's all. It will for example launch xine, or xmms, or nautilus, or k3b...

kudzu is the thing that checks for new hardware. This tool will indeed modify /etc/fstab if it finds a plugged device, that previously was not. But this tool, as well as harddrake, only runs at boot.

Finally, hotplug (with hotplugd service) is there for automatically adding/removing devices as needed; AND then call scripts to handle the new devices. AFAIK, those scripts are in /etc/dynamic. I'm not sure.

Yves.

cbonar · 12-03-2004, 08:02 AM

Very interesting indeed.

As a matter of fact, I forgot to tell that I have urpme magicdev, so it cannot be the originator of the problem.

As you told, hotplug may really be the one.
I had to deal with /etc/hotplug/*.agent scripts when I previously tried to use usb-mount, but I have not heard of the /etc/dynamic repository.

I'm going to look further in this directory...

Also, it seems that supermount is loaded as a module in my kernel ; I've disabled it and recompiled the kernel but I still have problems running it. Would it be an adequate solution to run a kernel without supermount ?

thanks for the reply