Linux USB drive help needed

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009, Fairlight wrote:
>In the relative spacial/temporal region of
>Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 12:59:32PM -0500, Brian K. White achieved the spontaneous
>generation of the following:
>> do they have a new enough dist that they have ntfs-3g which can write to 
>> ntfs? Or is the usb stick fat32 or fat16 in which case you don't need to 
>
>Most of the thumb drives I've seen have been NTFS.  All I can say is avoid
>FUSE and the NTFS module that depends on it like the plague; FUSE is one of
>the most worthless piles of source code I've seen in years.

I haven't seen any NTFS thumb drives yet, but then it's been a
while since I looked.  I would think that they wouldn't use NTFS
as that's not writeable on many systems.

The only thing I've used fuse files systems on is in conjunction
with the sshfs (secure shell file system), which might prove
useful in some cases, but I certainly wouldn't build a SAN with it.

There are a number of different schemes to mount hot-swappable
USB devices, none of which I find particularly intuitive (anybody
figured out SuSE's udev mappings?).  SuSE will automount them
under /media with a directory name tied into the serial number of
the device, and containing special characters that require
quoting in the shell.

One trick I have used to work around the SuSE automounting is to
create a known file on the USB, say disk-id, then doing something
like this (assuming that there won't be more than one mounted).

diskids="/media/*/disk-id"
test -f "$diskids" || {
	echo "$diskids not a file" 2>&1
	exit 1
}
mountpt=`dirname "diskids"`

test -d "$mountpt" || {
	echo "$mountpt not a directory" 2>&1
	exit 1
}
# do stuff here

Bill
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