On Sat, 7 Sep 2013 12:43:09 +1000
Zenaan Harkness <z...@freedbms.net> wrote:
>
> Which filesystem to recommend for external USB portable drives, which
> move between 'random' hosts?
I have gravitated to vfat, as some of us are required to use Windows
for professional reasons. Usually I use two or three partitions, with
at least one ext2.
There has been a recent problem with this approach in sid. I have a
vfat/ext2 stick on which, among other things, I keep ssh and openvpn
keys. Recently I tried openvpn from my sid netbook for the first time in
a few months, and it failed to find its keys.
On investigation, it appeared that sid was mounting the USB device as a
single drive, instead of two partitions. I have absolutely no idea what
has changed, as sid has had about half a gigabyte of upgrades in the
last few months. The netbook hasn't actually been updated for a month
or so, since before the LXDE issue, so it isn't something very recent.
A workaround, and I couldn't find anyone else with this problem (but my
three sids all do it on totally different hardware) so there may well be
a better one, is to explicitly specify the USB device by UUID in
/etc/fstab with the mount point as 'none'. Having had to mention the
device explicitly, I went on to specify the two partitions, so that the
vfat mounts with useable permissions. I do have some generic stuff to
do this with vfat USB sticks, but the single-drive mounting defeated it.
Usbmount was the first suspect, but this is an old, sorry, mature and
rather simple script. It was being handed /dev/sdb, so it duly mounted
the thing, even though there was no filesystem recognisable. For some
reason, it could identify the existence of FAT, so it mounted the whole
drive as vfat.
>
> Perhaps fuseext2 would simplify this? I don't have experience with it
> yet.
>
> The point is, a lot of us who would read this list, would be those who
> are able and/ or do install Debian for others.
>
> There should be an "easy for grandma" installation setup for the use
> ("by grandma") of externally attached/ portable drives.
>
> Anyone know what The Right Way(TM)(R)(C) is?
> Or should be with some scripting/ configuration?
> Or could be with some hacking?
>
> At the moment, the situation has been dissatisfactory (for grandma)
> for years now, as see it.
>
>
Indeed so. There is another set of operating systems on which USB
devices Just Work. I've always assumed there is a way to get things
working like this in Linux, I just haven't had the time to research it.
It is always quicker just to 'sudo' reluctant tasks, and in particular,
to sudo umount after a mount to check the device names. I don't have a
recent Ubuntu, but I dare say it Just Works there. I haven't used Gnome
for some time, nor KDE for years, so they may handle it correctly, but
this really is a system issue, not one for a DE to get right if it
wants to.
--
Joe
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