Some question about FreeBSD automount conf

alephoto85

Hello everyone,
I'm a GNU\Linux user since 1999/2000 and I'm relatively new in BSD world (I know about the systems cause the guy introduce me to Linux was a FreeBSD user XD and I used them sometimes in the past, especially NetBSD, but only for short period of time and not in "production machine")

Now I would like to use FreeBSD on my "new" everyday use laptop. Everything works fine, but I tried to configure the automount for USB storage (using autofs) and I have some problems with ext4 filesystem (paradoxically NTFS works relatively well XD)

I tried with fusefs-ext2, ext2fs and fusefs-lklbut nothing seems to work. Any ideas?

Second question, It's possible to umount from user in X11 (with Thunar of Pcmanfm for example)? I tried to make /sbin/umount usable from users in wheel, but I doesn't work.

Thank you in advance.

EDIT: I tried again this morning and fuse-lkl works manually. I probably need a map for autofs.
I found this article which helped me a lot, if it can be useful to someone ;-)

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/10/11/freebsd-desktop-part-17-automount-removable-media/

rvp

alephoto85 There is a chapter for this in the manual. For Linux ext{2,3,4} filesystems, you may have to add a -fstype=ext2fs to the config. line.

bsduck

Hello!

I don't use an automounter (I mount external disks from my file manager, which uses bsdisks in the background), but:

For ext4, you don't need FUSE (neither fusefs-ext2 nor fusefs-lkl), just use the built-in ext2fs kernel module.

mount -t ext2fs should work. What kind of problems do you have with it?

Avoid fusefs-lkl at all costs, it is unmaintained and buggy as hell.

alephoto85

bsduck rvp thank you both so much.

mount -t ext2fs works well manually, but it doesn't seem to be working with automount (even if it is present in special-media in /etc/autofs).

I would try to use autofs because I use i3 and mc as filemanager so, more out of curiosity than anything else, I would have liked to have succeeded XD

I also have a second user with xfce (for my wife) and, disabling autofs, Thunar works fine!
Furthermore, I could also use thunar in i3...

Thank you again!!!

bsduck

In fact, do you really want to use automount and autofs? File managers can mount and unmount external disks in a few clicks nowadays on FreeBSD, which wasn't the case when vermaden wrote the article you mentioned in 2018. Automounters were more useful back then than they are today.

If you mount something from your file manager, you'll be able to unmount it from there too, while you may not be able to unmount from a GUI something mounted by automount.

nettester

alephoto85 I will try to use autofs because I use i3 and mc as filemanager so, more out of curiosity than anything else, I would have liked to have succeeded XD

While i have not worked with bsdisks yet i used udevil for some time, which i believe is probably somewhat similar. At least udevil has a very simple CLI interface, so if you want to stay in the terminal nothing is stopping you from doing that and if you are a bit crafty with shell scripting you could probably bring most of it down to a couple symlinks or even more or less imitate automount behavior.

bsduck

alephoto85
You're welcome!

nettester
Thanks for mentioning this! I wasn't aware about it but there is a CLI indeed: udisksctl. I just tried it and it works fine.

alephoto85

nettester this is really interesting! I will do some testing these days!

Thanks you so much! 🙏