Wednesday 11 June 2008

LTSP 5 local devices fun

Been working on using LTSP 5 on a Kubuntu machine to replace our current LTSP 4 set up on debian. Part of this has been about getting local devices operational which, on the whole, works "out of the box" with the (k)ubuntu ltsp packages. The local devices appear under /media/ - which you could create a symlink to on the desktop for the users to easily access their devices.

However, I plugged in one of my USB memory sticks and nothing happened. So I went through the debugging routine:
Check that the device is partitioned (/dev/sdb1 rather than just /dev/sdb when plugged into my linux laptop)
Check that the ltsp workstation is seeing the device by logging into the local shell as root and using dmesg after plugging it in
Check the udev stuff is happening (look for an entry in /var/run/ltspfs_fstab)

That was where it was failing - no entry.

So I dug around in the udev rules and looked at the script that adds the entry to the fstab. Here was the source of the problem. This script uses the label on the volume to create the mount point and the volume label on my usb stick had a space in it - that was enough to prevent it from running the script properly.

So - if you want your removable media to work on a (k)ubuntu LTSP set up then make sure that any volume labels are without spaces.