At first, I was just adding an entry in my /etc/fstab file for the camera so that I could mount and umount it using the "Disks" menu in Gnome but much to my confusion the entry kept mysteriously disappearing. I eventually discovered that whenever I unplugged the camera, hotplug was calling updfstab which was removing the entry that I had put in /etc/fstab. The problem was that updfstab was not putting the entry back when the camera was plugged in. Eventually, I figured out that if I changed the entry in /etc/updfstab.conf.default from...
device camera {
partition 1
match hd DSC
match hd CAMERA
}to...
device camera {
partition 1
match hd DSC
match hd CAMERA
match hd OLYMPUS
}updfstab would now add an entry to /etc/fstab when I plugged in the camera (It's an Olympus camera). So now I had /etc/fstab being updated whenever the camera was added or removed but it was not being mounted/umounted so I decided to do some more hotplug research.
After some reading, I was lead to believe that a script at /etc/hotplug/usb/usb-storage would be executed when the camera was added. This didn't work at first so I scoured the man pages of hotplug for clues. Eventually, through dumb luck and trial and error, I ended up copying all the entries in /lib/modules/2.4.22-1.2149.nptl/modules.usbmap that started with "usb-storage" into /etc/hotplug/usb.usermap. After, I did this, the /etc/hotplug/usb/usb-storage script was being executed when I plugged in the camera. The script just did a 'mount /mnt/camera'.
The only problem now was that the camera did not get unmounted when it was unplugged and, in fact, only root could umount it which was inconvenient. So, feeling like I was on a roll, I kept digging. It turns outs that hotplug sets a variable called $REMOVER which you can access in the hotplug script ( /etc/hotplug/usb/usb-storage) which is the path of the script that will be executed when the device is unplugged. The value of $REMOVER always ended up being /var/run/usb/{cryptic_string}. So, I modified my script to actually write a removal script to that path which would umount the camera. In the end the script at /etc/hotplug/usb/usb-storage looked like this...
#!/bin/bash mount /mnt/camera echo '#!/bin/bash' > "$REMOVER" echo 'umount /mnt/camera' >> "$REMOVER" chmod u+x $REMOVER
Unfortunately, the /var/run/usb directory did not already exist so I had to create it first.
In the end, it works perfectly. I plug in the camera and it gets mounted and a little icon shows up on my desktop. When I unplug it, it gets umounted and the icon disappears - very nice.
What I'd like to know is, why did I have to copy all those entries from /lib/modules/2.4.22-1.2149.nptl/modules.usbmap that started with "usb-storage" into /etc/hotplug/usb.usermap? I don't really know enough about what these entries are but it seems like I shouldn't have had to manually copy these cryptic entries to get hotplug to work with my usb-storage device. Can anyone offer any insights?
It also would have been nice if /var/run/usb storage had already existed. Should this directory be created during Fedora Core install?
-Jason
