Re: mounting/unmounting devices for newbies

[Ryan Warner <rwarner plains NoDak edu>]

<snip>

> the disk again, linux gets all p'd off. Then I can't unmount
> the disk withought putting the first disk in... seems like it'd
> be good if you could just say "no, I don't care that you don't see it,
> unmount it, damn it!" This way a request to the floppy drive would be

</snip>

Is there any reason why if all the criteria for unmounting are met, no one's
using the fs and all cached data has been written (am I missing any?) that you
couldn't unmount the disk without having the disk in the drive.  Maybe I've
missed a correctly dismounted flag on the disk?  What about adding this
capability just to VFAT and FAT16 disks, leaving ext2 alone?

Ben, I suggest you use autofs.  You can set it to auto-mount the fs on access
and auto-unmount a drive after 1 second of inactivity (you still have to meet
the unmount qualifications that I listed before).  Only do this on a floppy
though.  You'll have problems if you try setting cdroms to unmount that fast.
I have my floppy, cdrom, and zip drive auto-unmount after 30 seconds.  I'm not
in so big a hurry I can't wait that long.

I'll say this again.  autofs and automounter need to have some configuration
tools.  Common things like floppy and cdrom should be configured during
installation of Linux.

Ryan