Manually (un)mounting optical disks

[Gilbert Sullivan]

On 01/07/2012 04:03 PM, Jaap Winius wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> My site has Debian squeeze workstations with Xfce that are otherwise
> running just fine. Every once in a while, though, someone inserts an
> optical disk in their drive that does not get mounted automatically. I
> was recently asked to assist in such a case and found that the disk (a
> DVD) would mount if I did it manually.
> 
> If an optical disk does not get mounted automatically, it there a an
> elegant solution to allow users to manually mount and unmount optical
> disks on their own?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Jaap

I turn off automatic mounting in Thunar on all systems for which I'm
responsible and have my users mount all external drives and optical
media manually via Thunar. We seem to have fewer problems with mounting
that way.

I have found that the pmount package works very nicely when a user calls
me and asks me to use a remote connection (SSH) to mount a drive or disc
manually. I log on via SSH, use

ls -l /dev/disk/by-label

to list what's connected to the remote system, and then I use the pmount
command (or have the user use pmount) to mount the drive or disc wanted
by the user to a subdirectory under media, according to the label.

This works very well for my admittedly slightly odd requirements. But
pmount is versatile enough to work in a huge variety of situations.
Since it, like the Thunar mounting scheme, allows regular users to have
control of mounting, maybe it will be useful to you.

I have actually had more trouble with external (USB-mounted) hard drives
(losing mount points, generally) than with optical discs, but both can
be a bit troublesome with either automatic or manual mounting under Xfce
-- and, I suspect, under other desktop environments, as well.

I hope this is helpful to you.

Regards,
Gilbert