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Automounting card readers and USB keys using autofs

Posted by chris on Mon 25 Apr 2005 at 12:57

Tags: , , , ,

Following on to the previous article on Card Readers and USB keys using udev we can go one step further and get automounting working.

Most of the information here is taken from http://www.greenfly.org/tips/autofs.html but is modified to match the information from the udev article. The naming conventions of the config files etc are taken from the greenfly article - which includes many more things you can do with autofs :)

Getting autofs

Again - on sarge or sid it should be as simple as

apt-get install autofs

We want to replace the following /etc/fstab settings

/dev/card_sd1   /media/sd       vfat    rw,user,noauto  0       0
/dev/card_cf1   /media/cf       vfat    rw,user,noauto  0       0
/dev/card_sm1   /media/sm       vfat    rw,user,noauto  0       0
/dev/card_ms1   /media/ms       vfat    rw,user,noauto  0       0
/dev/mobiledisk   /media/mobiledisk       vfat    rw,user,noauto  0       0

Step 1 - configure autofs

Edit /etc/auto.master - add the line

/var/autofs/removable   /etc/auto.removable     --timeout=2

This means that autofs will watch the /var/autofs/removable directory, using the configure file /etc/auto.removable and with a 2 second timeout for disconnection (how long to wait before you can pull the device).

Step 2 - configure auto.removable

Remember from the udev article and the fstab listed above that we are interested in the /dev/card_xx devices, plus the /dev/mobiledisk USB key. So - in /etc/auto.removable (new file) add

card_cf         -fstype=vfat,rw,gid=100,umask=002       :/dev/card_cf1
card_sm         -fstype=vfat,rw,gid=100,umask=002       :/dev/card_sm1
card_ms         -fstype=vfat,rw,gid=100,umask=002       :/dev/card_ms1
card_sd         -fstype=vfat,rw,gid=100,umask=002       :/dev/card_sd1
mobiledisk      -fstype=vfat,rw,gid=100,umask=002       :/dev/mobiledisk

Step 3 - restart autofs and test

/etc/init.d/autofs restart

Stick a card in one of the slots (say the sd card) - and try

ls /var/autofs/removable/card_sd/

You should get the directory listing of the card - for my Nikon I get

dcim/  misc/  nikon001.dsc*

Step 4 - Linking in to the system

In the udev article we used the /media directory for mount points. Remove any cf, sd, ms, sm or mobiledisk directories and replace them with symlinks

ln -s /var/autofs/removable/card_cf cf
ln -s /var/autofs/removable/card_sd sd
ln -s /var/autofs/removable/card_ms ms
ln -s /var/autofs/removable/card_sm sm
ln -s /var/autofs/removable/mobiledisk mobiledisk

Now you should be able to e.g.

ls -l /media/sd/

and see the cards contents. 2 seconds later it's safe to pull the card/key from the machine.

Notes on the mount options

Using the gid of 100 and a umask of 002 sets the device to rwxrwxr-x root.users. You can add a uid=1000 (or whatever your uid is to set it so that only your user can access the cards contents. You may want to set noexec or similar - especially if keeping root.users

Once again - thanks to greenfly.org for the background info here - I would recommend folk to take a look at http://www.greenfly.org/tips/autofs.html for further ideas :)

 

 

 

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using a
Posted by Anonymous (66.158.xx.xx) on Wed 27 Apr 2005 at 21:15
This is a great article! Combined with the last one, it has helped me understand how udev and autofs work together. The one part I'm still missing is how this all ties in with gnome. Now that I got this part working, how do I make it open a browse window in gnome autmatically after plugging in a drive?

Thanks again!

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using a
Posted by chris (80.202.xx.xx) on Thu 28 Apr 2005 at 06:01
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Now that's an interesting question - but I think it's going to need a gnome user to help - I use xfce - and tend not to use graphical file browsers.

Hopefully someone out there can fill in the last part of the puzzle for you.

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using a
Posted by Seaslug (128.30.xx.xx) on Mon 9 May 2005 at 01:12
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Gnome with Nautilus can monitor the directory /media for hotplug events, using pmount.

pmount settings need to be altered in configuration files (in Debian, the package is installed by default with normal user access turned off for security reasons - read the docs)

In the case of two identical drives, the device will be mounted on /media using the filesystem label, which can be changed or added using tune2fs or equivalent for other fs, as long as there is no reference to it in /etc/fstab.

under desktop preferences => removable drives and media there is a tab where you can check/uncheck automount, browse, etc.

So: plug in the drive and and icon appears on the desktop, and a browser opens if you want.

Drawbacks: The suid bit is not set under pmount, so write access is denied to the normal user by default. The program does not allow for safely unmounting the fs prior to unplugging, so the user has to remember to right ckick the icon and select unmount prior to unplugging.

Hope this helps on that one.

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using a
Posted by Anonymous (194.138.xx.xx) on Fri 6 May 2005 at 16:53
Read about project Utopia.

Project utopia (iirc) does _not_ use autofs, but I might be mistaking

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using a
Posted by Seaslug (221.254.xx.xx) on Thu 28 Apr 2005 at 07:59
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Interesting - I've been using encrypted USB harddrives as extention to the storage capacity on a laptop, but haven't quite found the way to run cryptsetup for the devices on plug in. Perhaps this is the right direction. Where would I place the Bash script?

Maybe /etc/hotplug.d/usb, and then run autofs off a /dev/mapper/blah event? Make life a lot easier.

Any input?

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using a
Posted by chris (217.8.xx.xx) on Thu 28 Apr 2005 at 08:58
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Not directly. I know that autofs configs can be scripts rather than plain files - see for example the /etc/auto.smb script that comes with the unstable autofs install. This will go get a list of samba shares available from a server when you ls /smb/servername.

It would be nice to extend this so that ls /smb/servername/mount does the expected thing. This would be similar to what you'd need to do - both script and mount.

Have to say that hotplug is still a black-box for me - it's on the list of "things to play with".

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using a
Posted by chris (217.8.xx.xx) on Thu 28 Apr 2005 at 09:26
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Just been thinking - this comment makes no sense. When an autofs config is a script - the output of the script should look like an autofs config file. So - the auto.smb script returns output that looks like
-fstype=smbfs \
         /share1 ://server/share1
         /share2 ://server/share2

So - scripting in autofs is scripting to generate the config details.

What are you using for the encryption? I've used loop-aes - and you can then add the loop=/dev/loop1,encryption=AES128 options to the autofs config the same way as any other mount options - but - how to enter the password that loop-aes prompts for I'm not sure.

I do know that passwords can be difficult. I've used lufs to mount over ssh (with ssh keys) but we use ssh-agent and that needs a password. No idea how to send it in :(

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using a
Posted by Seaslug (68.100.xx.xx) on Thu 28 Apr 2005 at 16:19
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I'm using cryptsetup - more accurately, cryptsetup-luks (though I haven't yet played with the luks extentions).

This allows me to use a keyfile in place of a password for the partition or device initialisation off an encrypted root, with single command. Can use AES with essid and a sha256 seed...

Check here: http://www.saout.de/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php?page=HomePage

Works good on an encrypted root, home, and swap (though the 2.6.11.7 kernel tends to thrash a bit in the cryptoswap - be warned)

I'm thinking more along the lines of running this, which will give the system a mapping for the device in dev/mapper/blah and then mount and unmount through autofs when the mapping is there (dev/mapper/blah shows up).

Briefly, /dev/mapper/blah ain't there until it's told to be by the cryptsetup command. After it's there, you can format it using mkfs (or whatever), mount it, and use it normally. Only gotta format once. Shutdown. Reboot. To get the device back, run the exact same cryptsetup command that you used to create the device, and it's there ready to mount. If you don't run that exact same command, the system sees nothing but random data on the device - excellent question for the bad guys to ponder ;) Cryptsetup has methods for automounting static devices on boot, but I don't think anybody's published a method for hotplugging a harddrive yet.

So, back to the question: How do I run the script that runs cryptsetup on a hotplugged harddisk prior to automounting?

I'll need to remember that scsi USB drives take a little time to settle before being fully identified as such...

Cheers

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using a
Posted by Seaslug (203.147.xx.xx) on Sat 30 Apr 2005 at 10:14
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Workin' on it-

Got an almost today...

Will publish results under seperate article, and the perls or bashes (leaning towards a perl, but I still think it may take just a simple bash) when it's done.

Ciao

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using a
Posted by chris (80.202.xx.xx) on Sun 1 May 2005 at 10:42
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Sounds good. I still reckon that you'll need to get the bash script running as part of the hotplug actions rather than autofs (although once /dev/mapper/blah is there the automounting should be trivial). I really do have to get some time to look at hotplug - it's been a "it work's so leave it alone" up to now.

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using a
Posted by Seaslug (203.147.xx.xx) on Mon 2 May 2005 at 00:39
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Yeah, that's where I'm going... I've thrown another wrench in the work, too. I have two of these drives, exactly the same manufacturer, model, and rev - so I'm playing around with using fs label in a tiny partition at the beginning of each drive as an extra identifier. If it works, I'll be able to plug both in and use them at the same time.

Goal: a laptop with 140 gig or thereabouts encrypted storage, 80 gig of which hotpluggable ;)

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using a
Posted by Anonymous (62.55.xx.xx) on Wed 15 Jun 2005 at 20:28
Hi, came across your discussion while researching a similar idea - I wanted to automatically copy podcasts (downloaded during the day) on to my mp3 player, everytime I put it into the USB socket.
Coincidentally, the July issue of Linux-magazine www.linux-magazine.co.uk has an article on doing just this and describes the setup of hotplug to recognize a particular USB device and run an arbitrary user script.
This is now working very well for me.
In outline, you add a entries to a xxx.usermap in /etc/hotplug/usb which name a script (in the same directory) to be run when a USB device is inserted.
Hope this helps
Pete

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using a
Posted by ste (81.174.xx.xx) on Tue 19 Jun 2007 at 18:09

In order to avoid opening the hotplug box, I just hacked up this autofs script. It meets my needs so someone else may find it of use too. It will automount an encrypted block device at /dev/sdb using whatever name you choose. The key files with a corresponding name in /etc is used to decrypt the device.

I have a set of removable hard drives that are used for backup (RDX QuikStor). With the following configuration I can insert a cartridge and the backup software (Bacula) can just mount it, making the encryption transparent to it.

The mapping for the 'cd' key also appears in this script. That's there because I'm mounting this at /media and hijacking the original, static /etc/auto.media. In /etc/auto.master:

/media /etc/auto.media
In /etc/auto.media: 
#!/bin/bash

# This is the path beneath this map's root that autofs is looking for
key="$1"

# A static mapping for the key 'cd'
# This is what /etc/auto.media used to do statically
if [ "$key" == "cd" ]; then
  echo -fstype=iso9660,ro,nosuid,nodev / :/dev/cdrom
  exit 0
fi

# The cryptsetup tool from the package of the same name
CRYPTSETUP=/sbin/cryptsetup

# This is the raw device that we will mount
mount_device=/dev/sdb

# This is the encryption key file
key_file=/etc/quikstor.key

# Options to pass to the cryptsetup tool
luks_opts="--key-file $key_file"

# Mount options for the encrypted fileystem
mount_opts="-fstype=xfs,defaults"

# The mapped block device
crypt_device=/dev/mapper/$key

# Give up if there is no key or setup tool
[ -r $key_file ] || exit 0
[ -x $CRYPTSETUP ] || exit 0

# If there is an encrypted device mapped in already, it must be from a
# previous mount. It may be out-of-date so remove it now.
[ -b $crypt_device ] && $CRYPTSETUP remove $key

# Give up if the raw device doesn't have a LUKS header
$CRYPTSETUP isLuks $mount_device || exit 0

# Open the encrypted block device
$CRYPTSETUP luksOpen $mount_device $key $luks_opts >& /dev/null || exit 1

# If we ended up with a block device, echo a mount line for autofs to use
if [ -b $crypt_device ]; then
  echo $mount_opts / $crypt_device
fi

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using autofs
Posted by Anonymous (207.161.xx.xx) on Tue 25 Oct 2005 at 23:52
wow, udev is a royal PITA, these instructions don't actually do anything for my system. I used to have a working auto mounting system, but foolishly I installed udev to try and get a tuner card working. It doesn't work, and installing udev broke the auto mounting for my external hard drive. THIS IS NOT PROGRESS!

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using autofs
Posted by Anonymous (24.228.xx.xx) on Fri 11 Nov 2005 at 20:37
Agreed!
At least,for now,this isn't easier nor better.I had my system recogniseing and automounting my ipaq,ipod,camera,IrDA,media reader,usb ext. harddrives,and bluetooth.Now ipod works and my reader is recognised but nothing mounts except ipod.Hopefully someone will make a better usb-storage script to work with udev,autofs,and hal and what not.

What was the reason for the switch over to udev anyway?I miss /mnt/ already,I hate /media!!;)

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using autofs
Posted by analogdog (71.112.xx.xx) on Sun 12 Feb 2006 at 04:20
First off, thanks for building this tutorial, and guiding us towards having our USB drives automount. I'm pretty new to Debian, and have always relied on the distro being configured for this for me.

I am having one little problem. Maybe I missed a configuration detail, or something else. But am finding this note in /var/log/daemon.log:

/var/log/daemon.log:Feb 9 21:20:01 localhost automount[9131]: lookup(yp): map
auto.removable: Local domain name not set

Where the heck would it like my local domain name set? I am not running yp, nor do I really want to, this is a desktop box...

Rob

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using autofs
Posted by chris (80.203.xx.xx) on Sun 12 Feb 2006 at 08:07
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Very odd.

I think I'll need to see the contents of /etc/auto.master and /etc/auto.removable files.

I found the following on a mailing list (in fact - the openldap list):

"By default, a map which doesn't have its type specified is treated as either a file-based map (if there's a file in /etc with the map's name) or as a NIS map, regardless of where the master map entry was stored."

which suggests that the master file isn't finding a file map and so thinks it may be a NIS map.

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using autofs
Posted by analogdog (71.112.xx.xx) on Mon 13 Feb 2006 at 05:06
You got it:

$ cat /etc/auto.master
#
# $Id: auto.master,v 1.4 2005/01/04 14:36:54 raven Exp $
#
# Sample auto.master file
# This is an automounter map and it has the following format
# key [ -mount-options-separated-by-comma ] location
# For details of the format look at autofs(5).
#/misc /etc/auto.misc --timeout=60
#/smb /etc/auto.smb
#/misc /etc/auto.misc
#/net /etc/auto.net

/var/autofs/removable /etc/auto.removable --timeout=2

$ cat /etc/auto.removeable
card_cf -fstype=vfat,rw,gid=100,umask=002 :/dev/card_cf1
card_sm -fstype=vfat,rw,gid=100,umask=002 :/dev/card_sm1
card_ms -fstype=vfat,rw,gid=100,umask=002 :/dev/card_ms1
card_sd -fstype=vfat,rw,gid=100,umask=002 :/dev/card_sd1
flashdrive -fstype=vfat,rw,gid=100,umask=002 :/dev/flashdrive

There it is, almost identical to yours. Glad to have you respond, I am getting no answers anywhere else.

Rob

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using autofs
Posted by chris (80.203.xx.xx) on Mon 13 Feb 2006 at 06:52
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I think I see it.

/var/autofs/removable /etc/auto.removable --timeout=2
cat /etc/auto.removeable

Look at the spelling of removable in those two lines.

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using autofs
Posted by analogdog (71.112.xx.xx) on Tue 14 Feb 2006 at 03:53
Geese. I guess I need the spell checker on at all times!

Rob

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using autofs
Posted by Anonymous (83.145.xx.xx) on Mon 5 Jun 2006 at 21:03
Hi Chris,
add one line to your great article after:
"Stick a card in one of the slots (say the sd card) - and try
ls /var/autofs/removable/sd/"

If you just type ls /var/autofs/removable/ and keep hitting TABulator (like me:), you don't get any device, you have to type that device to the end.

Quote from greenfly.org page "Notice that the cdrom directory didn't exist in /var/autofs/removable until I actually tried to access it. Then it only existed until it timed out, which, with my configuration, is 2 seconds, and then it umounted."

or maybe im just too slow :)

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using autofs
Posted by Arthur (66.28.xx.xx) on Sat 30 Sep 2006 at 10:16
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Find and edit your daemonoptions line in /etc/init.d/autofs script:

daemonoptions='--ghost'

Restart autofs, and your directories will always be there, but not mounted until you access them.

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using autofs
Posted by suspended user fiddler (209.148.xx.xx) on Sun 24 Dec 2006 at 07:20
Thanks for a helpful article!
After reading both this article and the "article on Card Readers and USB keys using udev" I got the device to automount. I have a question about the first part of this article. Toward the top it states "We want to replace the following /etc/fstab settings" and gives a grey box with a list of stuff from the fstab. These were carried over from the previous article about Card Readers. Am I supposed to remove the lines from the fstab or keep them in there? I put them in there from the previous article. The line I actually added says:

/dev/external_hd1       /media/dragon   vfat    rw,user,noauto  0       0

All of this is being learned to be able to automount a camera for reading the pictures in it on my daughter's Debian machine.

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using autofs
Posted by chris (213.187.xx.xx) on Sun 24 Dec 2006 at 07:53
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You will want to remove them. When automount is running then you don't need the static mount that fstab is providing. Simply opening the directory that automount is providing should provide all mount functionality.

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using autofs
Posted by suspended user fiddler (209.148.xx.xx) on Sun 24 Dec 2006 at 16:34
Thank you for the quick reply. I'll even clean up the other mount references that are in the fstab that I was using to mount this drive.

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using autofs
Posted by Anonymous (150.203.xx.xx) on Thu 4 Jan 2007 at 03:41
Hi,

Great article but I cannot get it to work, which I don't understand.

The only line I have in auto.master is:
/var/autofs/removable /etc/auto.removable --timeout=2

And the only line I have in auto.removable is:
usbdrive -fstype=vfat,uid=1002,gid=1002,umask=002 :/dev/sda1

I put this in to use with a usb drive, based upon the greenfly article, and the settings I took from your page didn't work.

However, when I try:
ls /var/autofs/removable/usbdrive I don't get an error but nothing is returned!

Would you have any idea why this would occur? I should mention that I am doing this on a intelmac, but don't know if this should make a difference. autofs installed fine.

cheers, nathan

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using autofs
Posted by Anonymous (150.203.xx.xx) on Mon 15 Jan 2007 at 03:05
I can answer my own question now - probably obvious to everyone else. My usbdrive was coming up as sdb1 - not sda1.

I thus change my ato.removable live to:

usbdrive -fstype=vfat,rw,gid=100,umask=002 :/dev/sdb1

and it worked.

This article obviously followed on from the previous one in which the devices (and their tags?) were identified, something that wasn't covered. I guess that's the danger of trying to copy commands without fully understanding them. I still don't understand how drives are given names by the system or whether they remain stable.

One observation I did make was that this system did work nicely when examining files on the usb disk, and opening files in openoffice. However, when I open a file from the usbdrive in openoffice it is read only and when I try to save a new file on the usbdrive I get an error saying the folder does not exist. I guess this has something to do with permissions to write to the disk, but haven't been able to work that one out yet.

[ Parent ]

#
Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using autofs
Posted by rmcgowan (98.207.xx.xx) on Tue 18 Sep 2007 at 08:57
Hi, Chris,

I was able to get automounting working, sort of, so came here to research it. I've had my system setup to use the LABEL=.... feature in /etc/fstab, for the USB devices, but wanted to get away from having to run the mount command manually or through an icon, every time I wanted access.

The main difference between my setup and yours is that I figured I could use the same label based reference to make it work regardless of the actual /dev node.

So, I have lines like this:

xdcard -fstype=vfat,umask=002,gid=usb :/dev/disk/by-label/FUJIXDCARD

The last item is a symlink to whatever node is actually created.

But, there's a problem. The xdcard item worked only about 30% of the time, while the one for my Archos PMA400 worked 100%, and the others all failed, period. After much futzing around, I plugged in the current node for the xdcard (/dev/sdc1) and tried that. This worked, and continues to work, no problems of any sort.

This implies a problem in autofs with symlinks. I thought this should be a bug, but as my experience with this part of GNU/Linux is limited, I thought I'd pass it by you and others in this discussion, and see if there is agreement on that. And, to find out if there's a way to make the symlink stuff work.

I know I could go back to the udev setup and create my own names, but this seems like it should work, in any case.

Bob

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using autofs
Posted by rmcgowan (63.82.xx.xx) on Wed 9 Jan 2008 at 21:33
Just to set things straight, following up on my original comment.

It looks like the automount files in /etc are format sensitive. I believe I discovered this when I used cat on the content of one and realized it contained tabs. I have my editor set to replace tabs with white space, which is normally OK and very nice when writing programs.

When I replaced my 'space' field separators with tabs, everything worked, even using the symlinks created in /usr/disk/by-label..

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using autofs
Posted by swani (76.75.xx.xx) on Mon 18 Jan 2010 at 02:29
Instructions worked great! But I didn't put gid or umask in auto.removable. All came up as root.root, with root-only write permissions. Edited the file, and still the same deal. Thought maybe needed to do autofs restart, so did. Now that reader, and also none of the other three I also had working show up in /var/autofs/removable! Udev still works, and creates mountable links in /dev. Any ideas?

[ Parent ]

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Re: Automounting card readers and USB keys using autofs
Posted by Anonymous (67.243.xx.xx) on Tue 9 Mar 2010 at 05:44
The same problem here (squeeze, autofs 5.0.4-3.1). I don't know if this is related to the changes in v5 of autofs (file:///usr/share/doc/autofs5/README.v5.release). In any case, the configuration described in this page and that would work in version 4 does not work any more. I've seen in an ubuntu forum that this may be fixed adding a line in /etc/nsswitch.conf (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/base-files/+bug/488077), but this trick didn't work for me.

[ Parent ]