[ILUG] devlabel & updfstab not playing nice

[Darragh Bailey]

Been having this problem for a while now.

Used devlabel to deal with a previous problem that depending on whether my
printer was switched on or not would affect which device my usb pendrive was
picked up as. devlabel allowed me to use a symlink to the device which it would
create and delete when the device was added removed, which meant that I could
use a consistent device name in my /etc/fstab file. This allowed me to set it up
so that any user could mount/unmount my pendrive.


my /etc/fstab file has the following entry for this device.
/dev/usb-pendrive       /mnt/usb-pendrive       vfat   
noauto,owner,kudzu,users,noatime,gid=100,umask=002 0 0


The problem is that when updfstab is run I get the following message
cannot stat /dev/usb-pendrive: No such file or directory

which is not supprising really, since unless the pendrive is actually connected
to the machine the device entry isn't going to exist since devlabel will delete it.


The possible solutions I can see are:
Get updfstab to ignore the entries in /etc/fstab that depend on entries that may
not exist
Get devlabel to not delete the symlink when the device is removed and instead
point it to a non used dev that will not be used by a device (/dev/null comes to
mind, but I'm sure there are others).


I can't seem to work out how to do either of the above or locate any entries on
the internet that cover the same problem. 

So can I solve this problem or is it a case of just having to live with it. It
doesn't affect any functionality but I still would want them to work correctly.

-- 
Darragh

"Nothing's foolproof to a sufficently talented fool"