Auto-mounting USB NTFS formatted devices on FreeBSD 10.2 and HEAD

[Edward Tomasz Napierała]

On 0125T1756, Julian H. Stacey wrote:
> Kevin Oberman wrote:
> > Since the removal of NTFS support, it is unclear how to get USB drives
> > formatted as NTFS (or ExFAT) to automatically mount. Prior to FreeBSD 10 it
> > was possible to replace /sbin/mount_ntfs with a script that would generate
> > appropriate options and exec /usr/local/sbin/ntfs-3g and let HAL fire up
> > mount_ntfs, but that no longer works as mount_ntfs is no longer used and
> > mount(8) no longer treats '-t ntfs' as special.
> > 
> > It would appear that automount(8) would be the right magic, but it's not
> > obvious to me how to configure it to recognize that an NTFS device has been
> > connected to a USB port (as opposed to msdosfs) and to use ntfs-3g to do
> > the actual mount. I assume that the same issue exists for ExFAT.
> > 
> > Does anyone have an idea of what magic is required in the auto_master or
> > elsewhere to make this work in conjunction with devd? I'd really like to
> > avid using hald, if possible.
> 
> I use devd to auto mount USB NTFS, I just it works with 10.2-RELEASE
> & an NTFS USB connected drive, here's a chunk from my
> 
> http://www.berklix.com/~jhs/src/bsd/fixes/FreeBSD/src/jhs/etc/devd/berklix.conf
> 
>        action  "sleep 10; \
>          rm -f /devusb/acer300; \
>          ln -s /dev/`echo $device-name|sed -e s/umass/da/`s1 \
>                 /devusb/acer300.1; \
>          ln -s /dev/`echo $device-name|sed -e s/umass/da/`s2 \
>                 /devusb/acer300.2; \
>          ln -s /dev/`echo $device-name|sed -e s/umass/da/`s3 \
>                 /devusb/acer300.3; \
>          mkdir -p /media/acer300.2; mkdir -p /media/acer300.3; \
>          chmod 777 /media/acer300.*; \
>          chown jhs:staff /media/acer300.*; \
>          ntfsfix /devusb/acer300.2 ; \
>          ntfs-3g -o ro /devusb/acer300.2 /media/acer300.2;  \
>          ntfsfix /devusb/acer300.3 ; \
>          ntfs-3g -o ro /devusb/acer300.3 /media/acer300.3" ;
> 
> Now I'll read man 8 automount & other people's alternate solutions
> on the thread :-)

Leaving aside the autofs as such, you might want to take a look
at the /etc/autofs/special_media shell script.  It contains code
to obtain a list of devices available for mounting, which works
with all kinds of devices, without any special cases, and properly
handles problems like "should I mount the whole device, like da0,
or is it partitioned and I should attempt to mount partitions
instead, like da0p1".  You can just run it by hand and see what
output it produces.