[conspire] question regarding mounting the Seagate FreeAgent Go 1T drive

Sun Mar 28 17:41:17 PDT 2010

On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 4:18 PM, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
> Quoting Darlene Wallach (freepalestin at dslextreme.com):
>
>> After I partition, format and label the Seagate FreeAgent Go 1T drive
>> and I'm ready to mount it is this what I should use:
>>
>> mount -t fuseblk -o rw,nosuid, nodev,allow_other,blocksize=4096
>> /dev/sdb1 /media/<myLabel>
>
> Er, no.  You seem to have been somewhat lead astray by Ubuntu's
> automouter into thinking that partition type "fuseblk" is somehow
> necessary and desirable for this drive.

Yep - duh! I will have formatted the disk as ext3 - duh!

>
> The latest and nicest NTFS driver for Linux, and also the initial
> implementation of the Solaris ZFS filesystem on Linux, were developed
> within the FUSE framework (a framework for mounting/umounting
> filesystems strictly in userspace, which is not the standard Unix
> method, which by contrast does the job in kernelspace).  Thus, the
> Ubuntu automounter sniffed your terabyte USB drive, noticed a (default)
> NTFS partition on it, and invoked the FUSE software to mount it.
>
> That doesn't mean it's in your interest to continue to use the FUSE
> layer after blowing away the NTFS and putting ext3 in its place.
>
> FUSE is a nice idea in many ways:  For experimental code, you can play
> with such things without putting something potentially dangerously buggy
> into kernel space, where it would be much more likely to freeze your
> system in a way that would necessitate hitting the power switch to
> recover.  Also, in the case of ZFS, implementing the Linux filesystem
> driver in userspace was a way of getting around the licensing conflict
> that would apply for standard kernelspace code.  However, FUSE
> filesystems are inherently a bit slower than kernelspace ones, and
> (for highly reliable filesystem code like ext3) it's highly in your
> interest to avoid the overhead and additional complexity of relying on
> the FUSE layer.
>
> By the way, after you make the ext3 filesystem on your USB drive, I have
> no idea if the Ubuntu automounter might decide to mount it without
> consulting you.  (I tend to kill automounters with extreme prejudice
> before I could learn what holes they're likely to shoot in my feet.)

I have Fedora 10 installed on my laptop I did not select automount
stuff when I installed the software so I don't know if any automounter
is installed.

>
> I've never seen the allow_other mount option, before.  Looks handy.  My
> Debian system's version of mount doesn't yet support it, so it must be
> really new.  It _might_ be FUSE-only.
>
> The blocksize=4096 option might also be FUSE-only.  In any event, with
> regular kernelspace-based filesystems, you shouldn't need that.  You can
> specify a block size when you run mkfs.ext3, but I would usually leave
> that up to the utility's heuristics to pick on my behalf.  And, having
> done that, I'm pretty sure you don't need to specify blocksize in the
> mount command:  It figures it out.
>
>
> Listen, if you dispose of the FUSE stuff, you get something like this:
>
>  mount  -t ext3  -o nosuid,nodev   /dev/sdb1  /media/<myLabel>
What about rw
Should it be:
mount -t ext3 -o rw,nosuid,nodev /dev/sdb1 /media/UUID-label
Should I have mkfs.ext3 generate a UUID label?

>
> Once you've tested that, _if_ you're planning on leving this drive
> connected to the machine most/all of the time, then add a line to
> /etc/fstab and let the startup routines take care of it for you.

Fedora 10 uses hal so I don't know if I can modify fstab and have the
changes stay. I thought it gets written over but may that has changed.

>
> If the drive will be sometimes connected, sometimes not, you can still
> add a line to /etc/fstab but include the noauto option.  This results in
> the drive _not_ being mounted at startup time, but makes it a lot less
> tiresome to manually mount it from the command line:

Here is my current /etc/fstab file:
$ cat /etc/fstab

#
# /etc/fstab
# Created by anaconda on Sun Sep 20 18:07:24 2009
#
# Accessible filesystems, by reference, are maintained under '/dev/disk'
# See man pages fstab(5), findfs(8), mount(8) and/or vol_id(8) for more info
#
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /                       ext3    defaults        1 1
UUID=e045a8cf-4cc8-451d-81bf-cf53792d027a /boot                   ext3
   defaults        1 2
tmpfs                   /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults        0 0
devpts                  /dev/pts                devpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
sysfs                   /sys                    sysfs   defaults        0 0
proc                    /proc                   proc    defaults        0 0
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 swap                    swap    defaults        0 0

It has been too long, where does the "noauto" go - before the 0 0,
after the 0 0?

>
>  sudo mount /dev/sdb1
>
> Because of the line in /etc/fstab, the "mount" command looks up your
> preferred options, mountpoint, etc., from there.
>
>
>
>> Should I add - uhelper=hal to the mount?
>
> {shrug}  I tend to stay as far away from HAL stuff as I can, but then
> I'm a certifiable fossil who simply hasn't warmed to a lot of the stuff
> comming out of the freedesktop.org / GNOME people.  So, again, suit
> yourself.
>
> I'd never even heard of that mount option until you mentioned it.
> Searching turns up:
> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=829279
> http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/redhat-fedora-linux-help/114239-selective-automount.html
>
>
>
>
>> mount -t fuseblk -o rw,nosuid,
>> nodev,uhelper=hal,allow_other,blocksize=4096 /dev/sdb1 /media/<myLabel>
>>
>> what about adding shortname=lower to the mount?
>
> That's a new one to me, too -- but I'm guessing it's only for FAT
> filesystems.  ext3 is a real filesystem, and case-sensitive by design.
>

Thank you

Darlene Wallach
-- 
equal justice under law