Today in 'Latest Ubuntu Karmic fails': USB drives automount with UUID instead of 'disk' as their device name
Normally a change in the automounting of USB drives in Ubuntu wouldn't be a big deal.
But in my case I've been using shell scripts to back up my Ubuntu box to USB drives via rsync. And before Karmic, those USB drives automounted with the name "disk" and woujld be at /media/disk/ in the filesystem. That was perfect for my shell script to target for the backup.
Now for some reason those drives are automounting not with the name "disk" but with the unique UUID number for the given device. At first this was bad, but after I modified my scripts, I actually see some wisdom in what started out as just another Karmic fail.
Not that I can't code around this, because I can (and I could probably put any name I wish in /etc/fstab ...) but should I have to?
Update: I've modified my shell scripts to rsync to the USB drives by their UUID-generated names instead of the previously given name "disk." The scripts work, and everything is back to normal.
It's another in the now-half-dozen things that have broken in the transition from Jaunty to Karmic. All were fairly easy to fix, but my idea of a successful upgrade isn't having to devote time to restoring basic functionality after an upgrade.
So where is the "wisdom" in this Karmic fail?
Well, now that each drive is being automounted and automatically given a unique name that happens to be the same as its UUID, that means I can further automate the backup process without much additional coding.
Previously I could've modified /etc/fstab to give each of these drives a unique name when they were automounted. Truthfully I never thought about it until now.
But now that each drive is getting a unique yet predictable name, I can plug both into the computer at once and do my two separate backups (first is everything but Thunderbird mail, second is only Thunderbird mail, and yes, I have too much Thunderbird mail) with a single script if I wish.
So from the jaws of fail comes the thrill of geekish victory.
3 Comments
Leave a comment
About this blog
New ways to sign in to comment: I just added the ability for prospective commenters on this blog to sign in using their AOL, Yahoo! and Wordpress.com accounts (for the past 200 posts anyway ... more than that will take an extensive, middle-of-the-night rebuild). That's in addition to the other sign-in choices, which include starting a Movable Type account on this blog, Typekey, OpenID, Live Journal and Vox. If you have trouble getting your Movable Type account verified, or any of the other sign-in options are not working properly, please e-mail me. With these added ways of signing in, there's more reason than ever for you to make a comment (or several!).
Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
There are many changes with Karmic which have made things very difficult for a lot of people. I support many different users that I have migrated from Windows, and many of them (Actually 13 out of 16) have had failed upgrades from Jaunty. The majority of these have been issues regarding the new boot process and initialization of X. Regardless of these issues many of the people I have been supporting have successfully made the transition with little problems. Once I corrected their systems via VNC.
There are still several issues that I have encountered though that have forced me to regress back to Jaunty myself. The primary ones are related to Media playback and graphical corruption. With the version of Gnome that Ubuntu ships, gstreamer has been made the only backend for Totem. While gstreamer is very good, it does have some major drawbacks, the main ones being that it doesn't support complex MKV's very well and chokes when moving between these types of streams (Totem will become unresponsive and hang. This is also an issue on OpenSuSE and Mandriva running the same version of Gnome). Also VLC is completely broken and will crash roughly 60% of the time on initiating playback, especially when modifying the playlist. The only media player that is working acceptably is SMPlayer, but it has limitations within its GUI that make it unsuitable for many usages. (No next button within fullscreen mode for moving between items within it's playlist)
On the graphics side I have had 4 major graphical crashes (Screen becomes filled with fragments of the windows/bars/buttons/video etc.) within a 2 day period. These have all occurred while running graphical effects, running AWM and using Skype with Video. I do understand that this does put pressure on the graphics system, but this has not been an issue in previous releases and for myself is a complete showstopper.
I hope that these issues are resolved shortly, but I do find myself for the first time in a situation where I can't recommend upgrading to Karmic for anyone, except the ones with the most basic setup. In short Karmic is not ready to be deployed on most of the systems that I administer.
Thank you for your insightful posts, I will continue to follow your experiences as well.
Chris
If you label the filesystem of the removable media, for example, as "flash", it will be automounted as /media/flash. Most current distributions, including Karmic, mount with the label first, and if a filesystem label does not exist, mount as the UUID.
Here's an article that will show the various labelling tools for different filesystems: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RenameUSBDrive
i gave up tired of experiencing this bug that should be fixed but not in my case
http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0910.0/01012.html
so i moved to debian