I'd like to create a "network USB hub", a central device, where all the coworkers plug all the USB drives, and then everyone can access them.

I wonder how I could set (headless) Ubuntu to automatically mount and share on SMB all the USB drives.

3

1 Answer

The procedure below is described in greater detail in the articleAutomatically exporting USB drives over Samba:

The tool used is usbmount, which is called when a USB disk is inserted to mount the disk. It executes the scripts in /etc/usbmount/mount.d using run-partsand /etc/usbmount/umount.d upon disconnection.

smb.conf

Create the empty directory /etc/samba/auto and add these lines at the end ofsmb.conf:

include = /etc/samba/auto/usb0.conf
include = /etc/samba/auto/usb1.conf
include = /etc/samba/auto/usb2.conf
include = /etc/samba/auto/usb3.conf
include = /etc/samba/auto/usb4.conf
include = /etc/samba/auto/usb5.conf
include = /etc/samba/auto/usb6.conf
include = /etc/samba/auto/usb7.conf

mount.d

To automatically create the above configuration files when a drive is inserted, create this file as /etc/usbmount/mount.d/50_add_samba_export, chmod as executable:

#!/bin/bash
SHARENAME=`basename $UM_MOUNTPOINT`
cat > /etc/samba/auto/$SHARENAME.conf <<EOF
[$SHARENAME] comment = $UM_VENDOR $UM_MODEL path = $UM_MOUNTPOINT read only = no
EOF
/etc/init.d/samba restart

umount.d

To remove the share when the disk is unmounted or removed, add in/etc/usbmount/umount.d/50_remove_samba_export, chmod as +x:

#!/bin/bash
SHARENAME=`basename $UM_MOUNTPOINT`
rm -f /etc/samba/auto/$SHARENAME.conf
/etc/init.d/samba restart

Tidying up

To handle the case of a reboot without previously cleanly unmounting, create a boot script to clear out /etc/samba/auto. Use an init script, say /etc/init.d/auto-share-clean:

#! /bin/sh
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: auto-share-clean
# Required-Start:
# Required-Stop:
# Default-Start: 2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop: 0 1 6
# Short-Description: Cleans auto samba shares
### END INIT INFO
rm -f /etc/samba/auto/*

Then:

chmod +x /etc/init.d/auto-share-clean
update-rc.d auto-share-clean defaults

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