Auto-mount external USB disk on a server

Sunday, October 4th, 2015

Althought modern Linux desktops generally automatically mount external USB disks when plugged in, servers usually don’t do this. When I replaced my home server desktop model with a Raspberry Pi 2 (running Raspbian), I wanted it to automatically mount USB drives and, more importantly, make the same USB drive available at the same path at all times.

Enter usbmount: 

The USBmount Debian package automatically mounts USB mass storage devices (typically USB pens) when they are plugged in, and unmounts them when they are removed. The mountpoints (/media/usb[0-7] by default), filesystem types to consider, and mount options are configurable. When multiple devices are plugged in, the first available mountpoint is automatically selected. If the device provides a model name, a symlink /var/run/usbmount/MODELNAME pointing to the mountpoint is automatically created.

Just what I needed.

root@rasp# sudo apt-get install usbmount
# Plug in USB drive
root@rasp# ls -la /var/run/usbmount/
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 11 Oct  4 10:30 Seagate_Expansion_1 -> /media/usb0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 11 Oct  4 10:30 ST4000DM_000-1F2168_1 -> /media/usb1

Great. Now I wanted the “Seagate_Expansion_1” disk to always become available at /storage. I could have created a symlink from /storage to  /var/run/usbmount/Seagate_Expansion_1, but I ran into a problem with SSHfs when trying to mount a server-side symlink on my client machine:

user@client$ sshfs -o transform_symlinks -o follow_symlinks 192.168.0.16:/storage Shares/timmy-storage/
192.168.0.16:/storage: Not a directory

So a symlink was out of the question. The binding option of ‘mount’ however, worked just fine:

# On the server
root@rasp# rm /storage
root@rasp# mkdir /storage
root@rasp# mount --bind /var/run/usbmount/Seagate_Expansion_1 /storage

# On the client
user@client$ sshfs 192.168.0.16:/storage Shares/timmy-storage/
user@client$ ls -l Shares/timmy-storage
total 72
drwxr-xr-x 1 1002 1003 4096 Sep 17 13:58 apps
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4096 Aug 24 09:15 backup

So I modified /etc/usbmount/mount.d/00_create_model_symlink and added the following code:

if [ "$name" = "Seagate_Expansion_1" ]; then
    mount --bind "/var/run/usbmount/$name" /storage
fi

This is not a very clean solution, but it serves its purpose just fine. A nicer implementation would create a new file “01_mount_bind” which reads a config file to determine which model names to mount –bind where. That implementation is left as a reader exercise ;-)

With this setup the /storage path will automatically become available at boot-time or when the correct USB drive is plugged in. I can use SSHfs to mount the remote /storage on my Linux machine. Samba takes care of the Windows users.