[RESOLVED] Best way to set up semi-permanent share

[floydbloke]

Linux noob here so apologies for dumb questions or erroneous terminology
Got my shiny new Dockstar yesterday and up and running with Arch Linux ARM now.
I’ll be attaching an external USB drive to be shared through Samba to become common storage for the various Windows PCs around the house.
What’s the best way to make sure that this drive gets mounted automatically on reboot, to the mountpoint defined as the shared folder in SMB.CONF
Will UDEV do the job somehow, or should I follow step six in the ‘Ten Steps to set up a Dockstar’ wiki

[coastal]

i believe you just to include samba as part of your daemon list you'll be done.

[WarheadsSE]

Other than that, you may need to specify in fstab, but it should be rather straight forward.

[floydbloke]

Thank you, doesn't sound too complicated.

Making sure I've got this right, in my smb.conf I define a shared directory and specify the 'path' to point to the external disk mountpoint (or in of its subdirectories).
So how do I make sure that the disk mounts to the same mount point every time the plug boots up, is this done in fstab? Will it always have the same device name, e.g. /dev/sdb1? What would happen if another disk was plugged in, is it safer/better practice to determine its UUID and use that in fstab?

[kmihelich]

You can do some trial and error tests to see the order of ports on the device, I don't remember off-hand. If you're looking for consistency though doing it with UUIDs is an effective way. And yes, all in /etc/fstab.

[floydbloke]

It seems when I boot from power up the external hard disk isn't always picked up but then once it's up and running and I do a reboot UDEV picks up the drive and mounts it, and SAMBA happily shares it. The intention is for it to be running 24 x 7 and I won't be messing around it with it a great deal.
I'm going to leave it as is, it's probabaly not good Linux practice or particularly elegant but it works well enough. I don't want to risk experimenting with it further and breaking it all together.

[WarheadsSE]

floydbloke:

If you edit your original post, you can add the [Resolved] to its Subject

[floydbloke]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('WarheadsSE', 'f')loydbloke:

If you edit your original post, you can add the [Resolved] to its Subject