Debian – How to automount usb drives in Linux (Debian)

automountingdebianusbusb-drive

With every new release the way to automount USB drives in Linux seems to change (fortunately I'm using Debian, so I'm only losing a few days on this every 2 years). We used to have usbmount, udisks, udisks2, udisks-glue, pmount, custom udev rules, and I'm probably forgetting many more. (A quick look shows that at least a thing named afuse seems to exist, but is not documented too well). None of these work anymore (for me at least).

What is the "current" way to automount USB drives in Debian? I used the following udev rule, but since updating from stretch to buster this stopped working:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", DRIVERS=="usb-storage", ACTION=="add", \
RUN+="mkdir /media/usb%n; mount -o gid=plugdev,umask=002,fmask=111,users /dev/%k%n /media/usb%n"

Also: what is the stable solution to do this, that will reliably work even after updating to a new release, that I probably missed?

Best Answer

You can create a systemd.mount and systemd.automount unit files. Here is an example:

To mount /dev/sdb1 under /mnt/moutpoint , create a mnt-mountpoint.automount file:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/mnt-mountpoint.mount

Note: The name of the unit file should be dir-sub-dir.mount extracted from the mount point /dir/sub-dir (if you need to mount the device under /media the name will be media-mountpoint.mount)

Then paste the following lines:

[Unit]
Description=Mount sdb1

[Mount]
What=/dev/disk/by-uuid/UUID_here
Where=/mnt/mountpoint
Type=auto
Options=defaults

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Use blkid to replace the UUID_here with the uuid of /dev/sdb1.

Create the mnt-mountpoint.automount file:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/mnt-mountpoint.automount

With the following lines:

[Unit]
Description=Automount usb

[Automount]
Where=/mnt/mountpoint

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Attach your USB then enable and start the units:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now  mnt-mountpoint.mount mnt-mountpoint.automount

Related Solutions

Debian – Automount USB drives with no GUI requirement (halevt replacement)

The disk-based features of HAL were replaced by udev and udisks.

There is a full example of how to use udev to do this on the Automounting UDisks wrappers page:

/etc/udev/rules.d/11-media-by-label-auto-mount.rules

KERNEL!="sd[a-z][0-9]", GOTO="media_by_label_auto_mount_end"

# Import FS infos
IMPORT{program}="/sbin/blkid -o udev -p %N"

# Get a label if present, otherwise specify one
ENV{ID_FS_LABEL}!="", ENV{dir_name}="%E{ID_FS_LABEL}"
ENV{ID_FS_LABEL}=="", ENV{dir_name}="usbhd-%k"

# Global mount options
ACTION=="add", ENV{mount_options}="relatime"
# Filesystem-specific mount options
ACTION=="add", ENV{ID_FS_TYPE}=="vfat|ntfs", ENV{mount_options}="$env{mount_options},utf8,gid=100,umask=002"

# Mount the device
ACTION=="add", RUN+="/bin/mkdir -p /media/%E{dir_name}", RUN+="/bin/mount -o $env{mount_options} /dev/%k /media/%E{dir_name}"

# Clean up after removal
ACTION=="remove", ENV{dir_name}!="", RUN+="/bin/umount -l /media/%E{dir_name}", RUN+="/bin/rmdir /media/%E{dir_name}"

# Exit
LABEL="media_by_label_auto_mount_end"

For more information about udev:

Writing udev rules

There are also a few options based on udisks that would be the new equivalent of halevt:

I couldn't find any of those in the testing repository, so you might have to find a third-party apt repository, or follow their instructions to compile the software on your own machine.

Debian USB automount

This is the easiest way I have found:

http://pkill-9.com/mount-usb-micro-sd-card-linux-automount/

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Debian – Automount USB drives with no GUI requirement (halevt replacement)

Debian USB automount

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