Manually (un)mounting optical disks

[Gilbert Sullivan]

On 01/11/2012 11:31 AM, Jaap Winius wrote:
> Quoting Gilbert Sullivan <whirly.gig at hotmail.com>:
> 
>> 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...
> 
> Interesting. Thanks for your reply.
> 
> How did you prevent automatic mounting from taking place? My guess would
> have been to to just removed the thunar-volman package from the
> workstations, but with Debian squeeze the xfce4 package depends on it.
> 
> Then again, why bother removing it? Why not use pmount together with
> Thunar's automatic mounting feature?
> 
> Since all of the workstations in my environment with an optical drive
> have an fstab entry with /dev/scd0, I was thinking of creating a little
> shell script with a few pmount commands, to be triggered by a desktop
> icon, that, in case an optical disk is not mounted automatically, would
> mount the disk if it wasn't yet mounted, and unmount it if it was
> already mounted.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Jaap

Hi, Jaap.

I'm sorry it took me a while to get back to you. I had a busy day yesterday.

When I said that I turned off automatic mounting I meant that I have
commented out the optical drive lines in /etc/fstab and turned off
automatic mounting in Thunar. Thunar can then still be used from the
local desktop to mount and unmount the drives. On remote machines via
SSH I mount and unmount via pmount. I didn't have to do anything to
thunar-volman.

All of my systems are running testing, if that makes any difference in
your considerations.

Regards,
Gilbert