New FC8 install: How to prevent auto-mounting???

Mark C. Allman mcallman at allmanpc.com
Thu Jan 31 18:07:19 UTC 2008


On Thu, 2008-01-31 at 18:31 +0100, François Patte wrote:
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> Le 31.01.2008 18:10, Mark C. Allman a écrit :
> > On Thu, 2008-01-31 at 11:56 -0500, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote:
> > I use mc from a konsole to do my file browsing. I'm quite comfortable
> > with using mount & umount from the command line as needed. I really
> > dislike finding filesystems already mounted when I expressly set them up
> > with the noauto option in my /etc/fstab. How can I stop it from
> > happening?
> > 
> > I'd actually prefer a root command line solution that will
> > make it impossible for kde to turn automounting back on.
> > 
> > In case it matters, I boot to runlevel 3 and start kde via startx as
> > needed. 
> > 
> 
> > I ran into the exact same thing last night.  A file system marked
> > "noauto" was mounted at boot time.  I had to comment out the line
> > in /etc/fstab and hack around the problem (put something in rc.local)
> > but it's a royal hack, not a solution.
> 
> The culprit is gnome or kde... for kde, I don't know, but for gnome you
> have a System>Preferences>Removable medias (something like that) where
> you can choose what you want.
> 
> Anyway there is some problem there: as cd/dvd devices are no more
> mentionned in fstab, I think that if you don't use auto-mount, you will
> be unable to mount your cd/dvd if you are not root....
> 
> This is boring: same happens if you want to format a cd/dvd/usb-key...
> whatever, you cannot unmount them to perform the operation if you are
> not root...
> 
> - --
> François Patte

The problem is definitely not gnome or kde.  The mount happens at boot
time, right after udev.  Also, the line I had in fstab was mounting a
usb 250GB external hard drive.  No CD or DVD drives involved.

I see the LVM find my logical volume (VolGrp00/LogVol00, or something
similar), I see udev "start" (I can't remember the line in the
start-up--I think it says "starting udev"), then I see an error saying
the drive with a specific label can't be found.  I can then provide the
root password to get in and fix the problem.  The drive with the label
that can't be found is marked "noauto" in fstab.  I've had it marked
"auto" and everthing's worked for the past three months, but suddenly
last night it stopped working so I tried "noauto" to skip the mount at
boot time.  The disk has the same, correct label--I checked.  I switched
back to "auto" and just commented out the whole line in fstab, rebooted
the system to run level 3, uncommented the line in fstab  and ran "mount
-a" with no errors, so I know it's not the disk label.  I suspect it's
something with the disk device (/dev/sdb1, I believe) not being found.
But why "noauto" doesn't prevent the device from being mounted at boot
time is a mystery.  

As I type this an idea to test just occurred to me, so I'll try it
tonight when I get back to my office.

-- Mark C. Allman, PMP
-- Allman Professional Consulting, Inc.
-- www.allmanpc.com, 617-947-4263

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