SCC 7.4.1 can't see my USB drives?

[probedb]

Sounds like a good idea.

grrr that pesky Gnome causing grief again...

Cheers
Jim

Indeed! I'm going to flatten my server this weekend and start again! Also discovered ntfs-config which means I shouldn't need to mess with fstab either.

[probedb]

It appears it's completely ignoring the automount settings in gnome.

Someone else MUST be having this problem.

Getting to a point where it's easier to sell my Squeezebox and plug an MP3 player in that get this working.

[pablolie]

I seem to remember running ntfs-settings fixed this issue for me, but I may have run some other command on top. I think I shared my experiences in another thread. In the meantime I have gone back to 8.04LTS, where no special anything was required to get 7.4.1 to access the USB drive with the local copy of the music collection (the mastercopy is on a Synology DS209 RAID1 drive I use for backups).

[probedb]

Well if I could just stop it automounting it'd be fine. I've turned off all the options in gconf-editor relating to auto mounting but it's made no difference.

[chn68b]

this is a real pain

I can mount the drive, but every time I reboot, it cannot see the library unless I go into the library settings, point it to another location (on the mounted drive as it still see all the other folders), hit clear library and scan, then abort and point back to the music folder and rescan all over again.

[pablolie]

What type of drive do you have? If it is an older USB drive there might be compatibility issues when mounting it. As you well know, successfully mounting it is just half the battle, you also need to be able to set it up so all users can take advantage of it, and SBS needs read/write access to be happy.

I agree it does not make any remote sense the way it is set up right now for Ubuntu installs... the fact you install software via your regular admin id and that then it needs a special system permission seems pretty unique to SBS, my assumption is certain 9.10 release adjustments (Linux kernel? Gnome?) have not been made in the SBS software.

I do hope by the time I migrate this machine -which doubles as my SBS engine- to 10.04LTS the available stable version of SBS (8.0?) will have made the transition. It is *both* a Linux and SBS issue.

I do have a 1 page command cheatsheet for Linux I keep so that I know what I did to get things to work. It is quite annoying that about 30% of it needs to be re-written from release to release. And yes, USB drive handling was one of the major differences. It got better with 8.04 to 9.04, something changed in 9.10. And that is within Linux, because I also have to mount my NFS partition differently (some experts in the Ubuntu Forums don't quite buy it, but I have the results and the Grsync logs to prove it).

[probedb]

Nope they're new. I believe after reading around it's something to do with the fact that the automount sees it as more internal drives and therefore mounts them regardless.

Seriously considering switching over to Win7. It has better power saving anyways.

[epoch1970]

I hate the guts of Gnome and rarely install a Desktop, and haven't tried Ubuntu 9. But I would surmise some of you are suffering a case of udev vs. hal battle.
AFAIK (I may be wrong) Hal uses udev devices, takes over and does its automounting, smart naming stuff.
Anyhow, even without hal, udev may assign a different name to your device, upon reboot or upon wake. And this breaks mounts, of course.

You could look into udev's documentation ("man udev" is pretty good) and to this (a bit outdated, still great) how-to if you want to control the name of a usb drive.

I've done this twice:
a) for an embedded platform, where I want the music drive to mount to a specific place when plugged-in.
b) for a headless server, where I want to be able to say to the users: "unplug the device from the yellow usb slot on the front panel, it's idle". (this one is more complicated, I guess it's hard to figure out the sense of the naming rules I use there. anyway.)

The key idea is to add a rule file in /etc/udev/rules.d/ named 01-something, so it will run first. With a carefully crafted stanza, you hijack the device from getting a standard name like /dev/sdg, and from there you get a fixed name and/or path, and I suppose Hal won't see a thing. Then you can mount the way you want: with udev (but I don't know how unmount can succeed when the triggering even is the plug being removed...), with an automounter if you're brave, with a script, or statically in fstab.

Note that if the device name gets fixed, there is a chance the USB port/hub/... number will continue dancing around upon reboot/wake. So you need to use a rule that is relax enough to apply in such cases, but that would not hijack your system drive name either

case a)

more ./etc/udev/rules.d/01-alix-custom.rules
ACTION=="add", BUS=="usb", KERNEL=="sd*", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="partition", NAME="disk/data%n", RUN+="/bin/mount /media/External-%n"
# Doesnt work and I dont see why. Remove seems to be received. 
ACTION=="remove", BUS=="usb", KERNEL=="sd*", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="partition", NAME="disk/data%n", RUN+="umount -l /media/External-%n"

case b)

more /etc/udev/rules.d/01-otto.rules
#Looking for this kind of stuff: /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:0b.1/usb2/2-4/2-4:1.0/host28/target28:0:0/28:0:0:0
#FIX:This doesnt resist wake-ups: BUS=="usb", KERNEL=="sd*", KERNELS=="*1-4*", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="partition", NAME="usb/Back/4-Yellow/disk-%n"
#    because the path can move to "*2-4*" after suspend... -> relaxed KERNELS match
BUS=="usb", KERNEL=="sd*", KERNELS=="[0-9]-2", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="partition", SYMLINK+="%k", NAME="usb/Back/1-Purple/disk-%n"
BUS=="usb", KERNEL=="sd*", KERNELS=="[0-9]-1", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="partition", SYMLINK+="%k", NAME="usb/Back/2-Blue/disk-%n"
BUS=="usb", KERNEL=="sd*", KERNELS=="[0-9]-3", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="partition", SYMLINK+="%k", NAME="usb/Back/3-Red/disk-%n"
BUS=="usb", KERNEL=="sd*", KERNELS=="[0-9]-4", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="partition", SYMLINK+="%k", NAME="usb/Back/4-Yellow/disk-%n"
...
# CD-Roms / DVD
BUS=="usb", KERNEL=="sr*", KERNELS=="[0-9]-2", SYMLINK+="%k", NAME="usb/Back/1-Purple/cd-dvd"
BUS=="usb", KERNEL=="sr*", KERNELS=="[0-9]-1", SYMLINK+="%k", NAME="usb/Back/2-Blue/cd-dvd"
BUS=="usb", KERNEL=="sr*", KERNELS=="[0-9]-3", SYMLINK+="%k", NAME="usb/Back/3-Red/cd-dvd"
BUS=="usb", KERNEL=="sr*", KERNELS=="[0-9]-4", SYMLINK+="%k", NAME="usb/Back/4-Yellow/cd-dvd"
...

You can use udevmonitor, udevinfo (try e.g. udevinfo --query=all --name=sdg) and the other udev* tools to figure out which strong characteristics you want to build your custom rules on.

Surely that's geeky stuff. But I think udev is a fine piece of software, it is powerful and you can get the job done. I recommend reading the how-to for the context, and the man page for the latest information (there is quite a bit of kernel dependencies)

And I sure hope this can put hal to rest

[hungarianhc]

I thought I'd chime in that I'm having this same issue... I have a USB drive mounted on a debian sheevaplug, and I can't get squeezebox-server to see my Music. It's rsyncing the music over right now. Once it's done, I'll try and change some permissions to get things working....

I'm guessing you guys fixed this in the end...?

..but rather than give that drive sole access to the squeezeboxserver 'user', why not just add the user 'squeezeboxserver' to the group 'users', then give read/write access to that group on that drive (as normal)? In OpenSuse there's a graphical way to do it, but I don't know about Ubuntu...

The command line for this would be something like:

sudo usermod -g users squeezeboxserver
^ ^
group to add squeezeboxserver to

But check your man pages to be sure...could also use 'useradd -g' I think...

Jim, I did that, but it doesn't seem to work for me. I've tried mounting / unmounting the drive, restarting squeeebox server, etc.

[hungarianhc]

Here's a temporary solution...

I have my music folder rsync'd onto a USB drive that is attached to my sheevaplug, and I was having the same problem as you, where SB Server could not see any of the music. I ran the following command on my music folder:

chmod 777 -R music-folder/

So this pretty much makes the file / directory wide open, permissions wise. It seems to be working though. The only bummer is that I plan on getting the rsync to run nightly to update music on the device, and one of the beauties of rsync is that i only syncs files that have been modified or changed. I'm wondering now after doing this big chmod if all of the files are going to be re-written next time I do an rsync.

So at least I have my music playing throughout the apartment on my SB Radio. That's a relief, but this isn't a very elegant solution. So I'm hoping someone can find me a better one soon! Thanks!