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Technical stuff and portability

Method used

transitmount is a basic perl script requiring no special perl module.

Any partition or device listed in /proc/partition that is not already claimed by /etc/fstab and not mounted anywhere is a candidate for being mounted in /mnt/transit.

The filesystem is first probed with file(1) to guess its type, and perhaps a volume name or other thing indicating where to mount it. Currently, if a volume name is found, then it is mounted under /mnt/transit/volumename, else under /mnt/transit/device , (/mnt/transit/hdc5, /mnt/transit/sdb1, etc...)

mount options can be setup according to filesystem-type, eg "nodev,nosuid,noexec" for ext2, etc... Reasonable defaults are provided.

You may be interested in the output of the program, see Examples of transitmount output.

You may be interested in How to put labels on your partitions.

Portability

This currently works on Linux only (not other unices) because it reads /proc/partitions . (By the way, from which version did Linux implement /proc/partitions ?)

This is setup for a system with SysV-like boot scripts (RedHat, Mandrake and the like will work out of the box). Other systems may have to adjust the boot scripts.

Porting to other Unices where Perl is available should be a matter of getting device names and labels without /proc/partitions .

hot-swap, hot-plug

It would be interesting to deal with hot swap and not have to power the machine down before swapping or adding hard disks.

Some SCSI hardware setups can afford hot-swap, and the linux kernel has provisions to insert new devices on the fly. On the IDE side, according to what can be read on the web, it may work but you may fry your motherboard and/or hard disk when playing hot-swap with vanilla IDE setup. If all your IDE disk are removable (supposedly you boot on SCSI), it's interesting to notice that if you have the ide driver as a module, then a rmmod ide-mod ; modprobe ide-mod should re-initialize the IDE controller and re-detect your IDE drive(s). But I've never tried a real IDE hot-plug or hot-swap.

Any information about this is welcome. But be careful! I'm not responsible for the experiences you may do !!

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Transitmount is available on the following mirrors: SourceForge.net mirroramphi-gouri.org mirror

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