Mount on remote desktop

[Johann Glaser]

Hi!

For a couple of X11 terminals we need to mount USB sticks, floppies and DVDs. Could you please give me some information to get this done.

Details: We have one Linux box running GDM for remote X11 login (lets call it 'server'). Additionally there are a few smaller Linux boxes running a quite small installation but including an Xorg server (lets call them 'clients'). Those connect to the server to login graphically. All this works fine.

The people working on the clients sometimes need to copy their data to USB sticks or bring data with them on USB sticks or DVDs. We want them to simply insert the media and access it as if they were sitting on a desktop machine. On a single machine when inserting an USB stick a new icon appears at the desktop and a Nautilus window opens with the root directory of that media.

Unfortunately there are two threads here for our task.
1) notify the server that a media is inserted into the client
2) remotely access the media

While we have several possible solutions (each with its pros and cons) for 2) (e.g. sshfs, nfs, smbfs, nbd), I ask you to give me some information for problem 1).

Currently we do it the following way, but that has major drawbacks. On the clients a permanent nbd-server is running and offers a certain predefined device via the network. The user can click an icon on his desktop which tries to connect to the nbd-server (at the client) from the server and then mount this. Due to the predefined device (e.g. /dev/sda4), only a few appropriately formatted USB sticks are working. There are others which are formatted differently (e.g. two partitions, only one big device without partitions, ...) and these don't work.

To solve this problem we hope to get a remote notification to tell the server _which_ partitions are available on the inserted media.

Is this all possible with HAL, D-Bus, udev and family?

Thanks
  Hansi

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