[solved] Automount and "autoshare" partition on a USB drive

Hello,

i would like to use an external usb drive with a NTFS partition on it as share (and samba share). That works like a charm while mounting the partition with the web ui and create the share via web ui.

But i like to have it automounted and "autoshared" without accesing the shell or the webui and want it identified by UUID as device names can change. After searching the forum i consider to create a Udev-Rule, maybe like this (example i found):

ACTION=="add", KERNEL=="sd[b-z][0-9]", ENV{ID_FS_UUID}=="a59332c2-07ba-4c52-afb5-20e361bdf71a",SYMLINK+="usb-%n", GROUP="storage", NAME="%k"
ACTION=="add", KERNEL=="sd[b-z][0-9]", ENV{ID_FS_UUID}=="a59332c2-07ba-4c52-afb5-20e361bdf71a",RUN+="/bin/mkdir -p /symbiosis/utopia"
ACTION=="add", KERNEL=="sd[b-z][0-9]", ENV{ID_FS_UUID}=="a59332c2-07ba-4c52-afb5-20e361bdf71a", RUN+="/bin/mount -t auto -o rw,noauto,sync,dirsync,noexec,nodev,noatime /dev/%k /symbiosis/utopia", OPTIONS="last_rule"
ACTION=="remove", KERNEL=="sd[b-z][0-9]", ENV{ID_FS_UUID}=="a59332c2-07ba-4c52-afb5-20e361bdf71a", RUN+="/bin/umount -l /symbiosis/utopia", OPTIONS="last_rule"

My Question:
How can i "autoshare" the partition on the usb drive? I read this [Solved] Adding Share Folder from USB Stick and understand, that it'll maybe impossible. Thats right? Maybe i can configure a samba share manually in the smb.conf to achieve the goal? Or is there another way?

Thank you for reading.
-aeronaut

Thanks for dealing with this, ryecoaaron.

The symlink idea looks like a nice idea, i'll give i a try.

I cant figure out how to set permissions/ownership on the symlink to access the linked directory within samba.

The samba share with symlink:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root users 11 Jun 15 13:23 automount -> /automount/
drwxrwxrwx 21 500 users 4096 Aug 8 2014 Camcorder

Target:

ls -al /automount
drwxrwxrwx 2 500 root 4096 Jun 15 13:20 .
drwxr-xr-x 25 root root 4096 Jun 15 13:20 ..

On a windows machine, it says 'no right' upon access the automount folder.

I tried to get Samba to follow symlink as following (not changing anything):

[global]
unix extensions = no


[share]
follow symlinks = yes
wide links = yes

Any suggestions welcome-
-aeronaut

As i cannot figure out how to get it autoshared with symlinks, i tried annother approach: Manually edit the smb.conf to share the mount point of the usb drive, which is mounted via automount.

That works, but the smb.conf gets overwritten with webui-configuration on rebooting.

Guess i need a possibility to have a "protected" part in smb.conf, maybe marked with annotation, that won't get overwritten.

Or a complete else approach. Can't imagine i'm the only one with the autoshare removeable devices requirement.

Thank you for any hints or advices.

-aeronaut

That gives me the option to be consistent with manually declared shares - great!

Thanks, ryecoaaron.

For the sake of completeness:

chmod +x /usr/share/openmediavault/mkconf/samba.d/21autousb

regards
-aeronaut