[CentOS] text-mode system and /media

Lamar Owen lowen at pari.edu
Tue Jun 7 19:27:24 UTC 2011


On Tuesday, June 07, 2011 02:45:32 PM Les Mikesell wrote:
> There's a lot of gunk that 
> assumes that the person logged into the console automatically owns some 
> of the devices - a concept that doesn't make much sense in the context 
> of a multiuser system that can handle concurrent users.  And I think 
> some of that is wired into the GUI parts.  I'd say you are better off 
> avoiding that and mounting/unmounting things the way you want.

That's one thing ConsoleKit and PolicyKit are for..... of course, if those aren't already being deprecated....

But I do use Linux at the desktop, daily, using KDE 4 for that matter, and it works marvelously.  I also have true multiuser GUI systems running; and I've found the tools that are in place to be reasonable, and further to work in a pretty intuitive fashion.  No dependence on absolute disk device names, etc. 

As an extreme example, on my EL6 testbed system, the boot drive is.... well, look for yourself:
[root at www ~]# mount
/dev/mapper/vg_www-lv_root on / type ext4 (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,rootcontext="system_u:object_r:tmpfs_t:s0")
/dev/sdaa1 on /boot type ext4 (rw)
/dev/md127 on /home type ext3 (rw)
/dev/mapper/vg_bak2-lv_lobak on /opt/lobak type ext4 (rw)
none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw)
sunrpc on /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs type rpc_pipefs (rw)
/dev/sdg1 on /home/lowen type ext4 (rw)
[root at www ~]#

That's not a typo; /boot is on /dev/sdaa1 (two 'a's).  It changes from boot to boot, depending upon exact delays, disk spinup on the devices under /dev/md127, and LUN recognize delays on the Clariion (which depends on which path happens to get chosen by the multipather as well as how much load are on the Clariions right now).  Oh, and it depends on how temperamental the 3Ware 9550 is being today, since the boot drive is on a RAID5 of four disks on it.

The first plugged-in USB disk will get, right now at this moment, /dev/sdad.

I like the /media/$disk-label convention; no matter how many disks I may have, removeable media will come up properly.  What I haven't found out how to do is tell the system that two of the SATA ports on the SiI3124 controller (where the RAID1 two-drive /dev/md127 lives) are actually external and thus removeables....

And even though this is a typical server box with a typically anemic ATI Rage XL, GUI performance, even with Firefox, isn't bad at all.  (Supermicro dual Xeon board with multiple high-speed 64-bit PCI-X busses and slots; haven't found a good low-profile 133MHz PCI-X VGA board yet....).



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