September 15, 2011 10:34 AM

Anybody know if I can prevent the pogoplug mount discovery process frpm mounting particular usb drives? Or at least hide them from the "virtual users" created by the web interface?

Lee Jones

September 18, 2011 1:32 PM

I have figured out a way to do this, but it's not "safe"... basically, you let hbmgr.sh do its thing, then tell it to stop.

It looks like hbmgr.sh starts dropbear, but it does not stop dropbear.

Anyway, with the hbplug process stopped, there are still block devices named sdX1 in /tmp/cement, so I tried deleting the block device file and creating a file by the same name. Restarting hbmgr.sh at this point seemed to cause the cemnt process to fail to mount the device.

I haven't done much experimenting beyond this. But, support basically tells me it can't be done. There's a feature request in the works though.

Next, I would want to use blkid and findfs to locate the device by UUID in order to automate the process. I already do this during /etc/init.d/rcS for mounting my /opt folder reliably, so it shouldn't be too big of a stretch.

Lee Jones

September 18, 2011 8:26 PM updated: September 18, 2011 8:31 PM

Well... First, get blkid and findfs on your path. You can get them from e2fsprogs and e2fslib as part of Optware. Next, get the UUID of your USB drive that you want to hid with the blkid command.

In my case, I want to hide a EXT3 USB flash drive, mounted as /opt, from the my.Pogoplug.com web site. I put the script in /opt/etc/init.d/S58hidefromce and added it to /etc/rcS after /opt is mounted.

For my example, my EXT3 flash drive's UUID (per blkid) is fcdf4330-9ef9-fad8-a245-f3cf9bef5e6b

#!/bin/sh

# /opt/etc/init.d/S58hidefromce
# Used to mask a particular device (by UUID from blkid) from hbwd / hbmgr.sh / cemnt / my.pogoplug.com

HIDEME=`findfs UUID=fcdf4330-9ef9-fad8-a245-f3cf9bef5e6b | cut -d"/" -f3`

sleep 30
/etc/init.d/hbmgr.sh stop
rm /tmp/.cemnt/$HIDEME
> /tmp/.cemnt/$HIDEME
/etc/init.d/hbmgr.sh start

There are a few drawbacks... For example, I'm not checking to see if hbwd is already running, so by attempting to hide it, I will actually start the process (because I try to stop it, then start it). Second, if hbwd never ran, I think the process would fail because I am not checking for the .cemnt folder. Also, I'm not checking if findfs succeeds or not, I just assume it does (if you typo the UUID, it fails). You need to install findfs first... blah blah blah.

On the other hand, if you get the UUID right, this should work every time. Now, I am running it from /opt (the very drive I am trying to hide) because I only want it to run IF the drive I am hiding mounted to /opt successfully. YMMV.

Lee Jones

October 19, 2011 9:52 AM

BTW... I did see a bunch of core files in /tmp, probably because of this, so I added a cron job to delete the core files.

Lee Jones