wish: perfect handling of removable devices

[Marko Macek <Marko Macek gmx net>]

Hi!

I have 
  - PC floppy
  - CDROM
  - ZIP 100

How would I like things to work:

  1) all devices are mounted automatically (using autofs on /misc)

  2) ZIP/CD eject button will unmount and eject the device if not in
use.

  3) floppy device will be unmounted before the floppy is turned off.
     PC standard says that floppy light must should turn off 2 second
after last         write, so it would be a good idea to start the
unmount 1 second before that.

  4) If floppy is ejected/replaced while files are open, the kernel
should handle 
     it gracefully by either discarding the data, or cacheing it until
the same
     floppy is reinserted. This would need a fs with a serial#. If the
data is           cached, there should be some kind of notification to
the user space so the          user can be prompted).
 
  5) Icons in the panel should change if the fs is mounted and there
     should be an Eject (for CD,Zip) / Unmount option in the context
menu.

I am currently using autofs. It does #1 very well. #3 could be achieved
by setting the timeout to 1 second, but since the timeout is specified
for the autofs mountpoint and not for the device mount this is
problematic (I don't like to unmount CDROM and ZIP so often). I could
put them on different directories, but that is not an optimal solution.

Also: eject 2.0.2 from RedHat 6.0 doesn't allow eject of ZIP drive
unless the user is root. (ejecting a CD works fine).

Mark
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Marko.Macek@gmx.net                 http://www.kiss.uni-lj.si/~k4fr0235/