Automount external hard drive?

[Reid Rivenburgh]

On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 3:24 PM, Todd Denniston
<Todd.Denniston at ssa.crane.navy.mil> wrote:
>  Set the wireless router right on top of the drive for a while, then set it
>  under the drive for a while. :)
>  if the frequency goes back up, I would say you have a high likely hood of
>  having found the problem, if so please remind us what HD manufacturer is
>  affected by the RF so we can avoid one or the other. :)
>  Granted I would also move the router away again and try setting the drive in
>  different orientations to see if a connector was affected (i.e. loose).

Well, I don't think the connections were loose....  And I will get
back to you on the RF experiment.  I'm a little tired of experimenting
with this drive at the moment!  I was thinking that I wouldn't be
seeing as many disconnects since it would often not be mounted (as you
pointed out), but that may not be true.  The drive contains my music
files, and amarok apparently looks for changed files quite often.
/var/log/messages is showing that it's remounted a few seconds after
autofs is timing out the mount (which I configured to be three minutes
for no particular reason).  Are there any downsides to such frequent
mounts/unmounts?  I suppose I could exit amarok or turn off the file
modification check....

>  To me having autofs setup with a timeout much smaller than you are seeing the
>  fault would be a good thing for a few reasons:
>  1) drive is not mounted during a fault, no fsck needed.
>  2) drive is not mounted when not needed, see (1)
>  3) mounting should cause the drive to spin up and all that jazz so that, it is
>  ready to work WHEN someone needs it.
>  You might want to tune2fs and raise the fsck timeouts because they will go up
>  a little quicker this way.
>  You'll need to fsck by hand when ever you feel the need, or get tired of
>  seeing "mounting drive that needs fscked" in syslog and dmesg, it will not
>  happen automatically.

Ah, that's good to know.  Thanks for the information!

reid