Re: wish: perfect handling of removable devices

[famrom idecnet com (Guillermo S. Romero / unnamed / Familia Romero)]

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

/mnt/... here.

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

Kernel task, I guess. Supposing hardware can tell kernel when the button was
pushed.

>  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.

Use sync option.

>  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).

Use sync, and forget all that. Discarding data is not a good thing.
 
>  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.

Yes.

>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.

Why you do not use multiple mount points? Never tried with autofs, but
sounds logical. I use /mnt/cdrom, /mnt/floppy, /mnt/extradisk,
/mnt/other_machine_nfs and so on. Yes, one step more, but also could be
/cdrom, /floppy and /zip.

>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).

Bug, I guess. Or check permissions. I upgraded and ha to check that for CD
(mine is SCSI, I think RH forgot to check that).

GSR