SCSA10-1 Objective 2.7 - mounting filesystems/cdroms, volume management
Solaris automatically mounts some filesystems during the boot process, and the volume management system mounts CD-ROMs for you, normally. There are times when you need to manually perform these tasks:
Perform mounts and unmounts on a Solaris 10 OS file system, and use volume management to access mounted diskettes and CD-ROMs, restrict access, troubleshoot volume management problems, and explain access methods without volume management.
Mounting a UFS filesystem is straightforward. Unmounting a filesystem can be trickier because Solaris wants to be sure that the filesystem is quiet and not in use (no open files) before it pulls the plug. Here is a discussion of determining what processes or users are using the unmountable filesystem.
Volume management in Solaris 10, using the vold service, makes using removable media substantially easier and possible for non-root users. The vold process runs in the background and watches for insertion or removal of media like CD-ROMs, floppies, and tape drives. After adding a supported drive to the system, a reconfiguration boot is generally all that is required for vold to see the new device and add it to its configuration.
After media has been inserted into the drive, vold may automatically see it and mount it. If not, you can force vold to check the devices by running volcheck. The standard mount points for removable media are /floppy for floppy disks and /cdrom for CD-ROMs. The first cdrom drive will be mounted as /cdrom/cd_volume_name and will also have a symbolic link to that as /cdrom/cdrom0 which is a more convenient path to remember as it will always be the same.
As for restricting access to removable media, Sun’s documentation suggests using RBAC (role based access control) for access control, although this is an elaborate mechanism. If anyone has other suggestions, please comment.
When volume management doesn’t work, it is frustrating. The temptation is to kill vold and restart it, but this rarely helps. Giri Mandalika has a good post describing vold troubleshooting for Solaris 10 involving smserver. Giri also has a clear, simple method for mounting a CD-ROM without volume managment.
While not specifically part of the exam objectives, it is good to know about ejecting removable media while volume management is running. The eject button on the drive is disabled while vold is in control (to prevent manual ejects while the media is in use). The eject command will eject the default device, otherwise a specific device can be ejected as eject cdrom or eject floppy. If media won’t eject, it is usually because it is in use, generally because some shell’s current working directory is somewhere on its filesystem. The same techniques described above to determine what is preventing fixed media from unmounting will work with removable media.