Automount utility dissapears?

Forum: User Feedback
Topic: Automount utility dissapears?
started by: DaveJ45

Posted by DaveJ45 on June 26 2006,07:14

I will preface my question by conceding that, obviously, the system I am using DSL on is a bit unconventional.

I want to use DSL on a machine to act as a CD/DVD-ROM server.

The machine has 2 CD/DVD-ROM drives mounted internally on a SCSI card, which I intend to expand to 7.
There are 7 additional CD-ROM drives connected to a seperate SCSI in an external case.

DSL finds all the drives just fine, and assigns the following device names:

cdrom
cdrom1
cdrom2
cdrom3
cdrom4
cdrom5
cdrom6
cdrom7
cdrom8

Sometimes, when clicking on the MOUNT button in the automounter utility on the bottom right hand corner of the screen, the utility disappears from the screen and never comes back until after a reboot if I mount all of the drives simultaneously. I can however, continue to issue commands in a terminal window to continue to mount/unmount drives.

Anyone have any ideas on what causes this?

Is there some sort of built in limitation to how many drives the automounter utility can handle?

I checked the /dev directory, and DSL has mounts for cdroms up to 16 or 18, if memory serves me correctly, so I am working on the assumption that mounting 14 CD/DVD-ROMS will not be a problem. In an ideal situation, I could even add 7 more CD-ROMs with a 3rd SCSI card, but since there do not seem to be at least 21 cdrom mounts in the /dev directory, I am guessing that this would not be feasible.

The machine is a 1.4Ghz Celeron with 128K of memory, and a 320K swap file, and it is not doing anything except waiting for a network request to read one of the mounted drives, so I am thinking it is not a system resource shortage, but perhaps some sort of limitation inside DSL or the automounter utility?

I am looking to set the machine up with Samba, and use it to serve static data stored on the CD drives to my Windows workstations. I expect I will create a script to issue the required commands to mount all of the drives upon startup, so I am expecting that it will not be an issue, just wondering what causes the automounter utility to disappear when mounting the drives manually.

DaveJ45

BTW, I do know there are ways to store the ISO images on a hard drive and mount them on a request basis, but, since I already have the data on CD's (with HD backups) and I already have the drives, enclosures, cabling and SCSI cards, I am trying to make use of the equipment at hand.