Re: SEUL: automatic floppy mounting

[Alexandru Dan Corlan <dcorlan@ottonel.pub.ro>]

> One of the things that an end user OS needs to do is relieve the user
> of the task of mounting and unmounting floppies (and other removable
> media). This is a source of confusion and error for many users since
> ejecting a disk that is still mounted can, and usually will, result
> in corrupted data.

True.

> 
> I have read about a tool called "supermount", available on sunsite,
> that will do exactly what I am talking about. Has anyone tried it
> out? Could they give a recomendation of the program?
> 

There are at least two other solutions to this problem. One is obviously the
mtools one. The other is amd (the auto mount daemon) which works
for ext2fs diskettes as well: you configure amd to mount the
diskette whenever an access is attempted on it and to unmout it
at, say, 1s after the access.

Nevertheless, with my colleagues who used Norton Commander in the
pre-Linux era, I took another approach. After they login, a (dialog-made) 
menu appears from which they can select to browse through documents
and edit them, run various local applications, start pine, or
enter Midnight Commander. They can enter Midnight Commander in three
ways (you know there are two pannels): with their home directory and the
sitewide directory, with their home directory and diskette /fd0 (I try
to prevent them from speaking of A: and B: anymore) or with their
home directory and diskette /fd1. 

The script run by the diskette mc option first does an fdmount (mount
can only be done by root on our system), then enters mc as specified,
then it does an fdumount.

They know that, in order to place a new diskette in the floppy drive,
they must leave Midnight Commander and enter it again, and they
usually accept that (in Norton Commander they had to do a `reread'
when they changed the diskette, otherwise it could even crash).

We use MS-DOS formatted diskettes because they can be read
on any system, Linux, DOS/W$ or Mac, and transport of files
is the main purpose of the 3'' diskettes (as they don't
survive for more then 3 months, do they :-().

Alexandru




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