How could I automatically create a network share of every USB drive on Linux?

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.

1 Answer

The procedure below is described in greater detail in the article Automatically 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-parts and /etc/usbmount/umount.d upon disconnection.

smb.conf

Create the empty directory /etc/samba/auto and add these lines at the end of smb.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