Re: OT: Floppy disk change detection - auto mounts?

[Stelios Bounanos <sb@dial.pipex.com>]

In message <[🔎] Pine.LNX.4.10.10006080759440.9831-100000@timshel> , 
Rick Macdonald <rickmacd@home.com>  was rumoured to have said about 
`` OT: Floppy disk change detection - auto mounts? '': 

> 
> One thing that has always surprised me on Linux is that there doesn't seem
> to be any automatic mount/umount handling of floppy drives (DOS format).
> 
> I guess I'm thinking of something similar to the pcmcia card manager that
> detects insert/remove events and automatically loads and unloads drivers.
> 
> Perhaps there is and I missed it?
> 
> /etc/fstab:
> /dev/fd0         /dosa       msdos       user,noauto
> 
> I mount with:  mount /dosa
> 
> If I pop out the floppy and put in another, "ls" still shows the contents
> of the first floppy.
> 
> Having to umount/mount for every floppy gets tedious! Is there some
> feature that I don't know about to help with this?
> 
> I just switched from WABI to Wine for running Quicken. WABI accessed the
> floppy device directly and didn't need any external help. With
> Wine/Quicken, I have to do the mount/umount each time. Quicken2000 backup
> files don't fit on one floppy. I'm new to wine and not very trusting
> yet so I backup my work every 10 or 20 minutes.
> 
> ...RickM...
> 

Hello Rick,

Have you tried the automounter? You can set a timeout after which a 
device (in this case the floppy drive) will be auto-unmounted, if not
busy. With a small enough timeout you could emulate the windows 
behavior.

automount(8), autofs(5), auto.master(5), autofs(8) etc. have all the
necessary information to set it up, but note that you also need autofs
support in the kernel. The debian package name is autofs.

HTH.

Regards,
sb.

-- 

Stelios Bounanos <sb@dial.pipex.com>
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