Some ideas/questions.

[Stef Bon]

Hello,

Hello,

I've been working on a construction which adds an autofs managed 
mountpoint to the homedirectory for USB devices (local hardware) and 
network connections.

This looks like:

/home/sbon/Connections

is the base directory for all kinds of connections (network, all kind of 
hardware)

Earlier I've been working on a construction to create a browseable 
network map here, also with autofs.
Network resources like SMB shares, FTP servers and SSH access is 
possible. (SMB via cifs, FTP via curlftpfs/FUSE, SSH via sshfs/FUSE). 
Access to Novell networks should also be possible.

Now about devices. When I add a device during my session, the (virtual) 
directory Devices (or you can name it Media) is added, and therein my 
USB stick:

/home/sbon/Connections/Devices/USB_DISK_Pro

Other devices should also appear in this directory.
I do not have published this yet anywhere, but it is simular to the one 
you can find here:

http://www.gentoo-wiki.info/Autofs#UDEV_with_autofs

The big difference with my construction is that the mountpoint is *in* 
the users homedirectory, not in /media: direct accessible for users from 
their homedirectory, where going to a "foreign" place like /media is not 
that userfriendly. This also counts for the networkconnections. I've 
described this here:

http://linux.bononline.nl/linux/automountsmbshares/index.php

The result is a map in the homedirectory of the user, where all kinds of 
connections are available:

/home/sbon/Connections/Devices/Flash_Disk
                                                        USB_DISK_Pro
                                          Network/FTP
                                                          SSH Access
                                                          Windows Network

Now, with my desktop environment (KDE 4.2) the integration with the USB 
devices is not that good, which has to with hal, as you maybe already 
know. Hal mounts devices at /media, not in a subdirectory of the users home.

Now, my first question. Isn't it a good idea to make hal use the 
mountdirectory of the user, like above. As I've already said this is far 
more userfriendly.

The second is the cooperation with autofs. Let the mountpoints be 
handled by autofs, which is the tool to do that. Mountoptions can be 
parsed, as well as the mounpoints and the device.

Stef Bon