Marc Chamberlin wrote:

Carlos E. R. wrote:

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Marc Chamberlin wrote:

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John Andersen wrote:

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Many thanks John, Kai and Dave for your replies... Kai you probably hit it on the head, a Win's like automount would probably do the trick and yeah I have tried most of the mount options you guys mentioned... What would be really cool is if there was a way to automagically discover all the computers on a network, much like Windoz does, and then I could create a list to work from...

I thought that "avahi" was for that, but I don't know how.

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Your suggestions however has got me thinking and I think you have put me on a path that might work, at least for Linux/SuSE systems.. (I will worry about Windoz separately....) I am now trying to write a script that will periodically run via a cron job. It will ping and test to see if each computer, on a list of known computers on our network, can be found. Depending on the results, this script will dynamically modify the contents of fstab within a specially comment delineated region.

You could simply have the remote mounts marked "noauto". These should not be mounted automatically during boot, but will have to be manually mounted by a command. You ping, it is up, then mount.

Or, instead of automated by cron, another script to mount shares, which first pings the machine, then mounts the share. The user gives the name of the machine or the directory that he wants as a parameter. If the other machine does not respond, give the appropriate message.

Mounting manually on request might have the advantage if the user happens to know how long the other machine is going to be up.

Mmm... I wonder if machines that are about to be unplugged could broadcast some kind of message so that the users connected to its shares have time to umount safely.

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Now to figure out where the hooks are to inject my scripts into the boot up and shutdown processes... I think I know - /etc/rc.d looks promising...

Read the man page and the admin book! SuSE is different in this respect, and simply writing scripts there, and adding links manually, will not work. There is a readme there and an skeleton sample script, too

- -- Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R. (from 11.1-ex-factory) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with SUSE - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

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Thanks Carlos for your reply.. I was not aware of Avahi so will go an poke my nose into it.. (so much to learn, so little time!)

As for your suggestions on mounting file systems, I am pondering on em to see if they can apply.. I am trying to come up with a solution for our network users that rely as little as possible on them having to do anything... Make the mounting and sharing of file systems as automated as possible and robust enough to survive a dynamic network environment without a lot of inconvenient delays... I can install scripts on each laptop/desktop at will, but they will need to be able to not only handle a "work" network configuration, but a "home" one as well... This means my scripts must be adaptable to different networks and not force the user into having to do any sort of reconfiguring manually...

I will RTFM the admin manuals and look for the examples as you suggested, before I go mucking around installing my scripts... I think I am getting the big picture in my mind on how to proceed, and will delve into the details in a bit....

Marc..

P.S. Sorry Carlos I did not mean to reply to your personal address, durn Thunderbird email client won't set the reply to properly for the opensuse mail list... -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org