Second attempt: automountĪutomount is a really neat tool that allows known drives to be automounted when they are required, an optionally unmounted after a period of inactivity. This would break media paths in the library. This doesn't work for us because there is no guaranteed consistency in the mount points: if you have three hard drives, then a drive that is mounted at /media/usb0 may become /media/usb2 the next time the system is booted or drives are removed and re-inserted. and use the first available mount point for removable drives when they are inserted. Usbmount will automatically create a load of mount points in /media like /media/usb0, /media/usb1 etc. If you wanted to use usbmount for something else, all you need to do is install it: For example, you might have a USB stick with photos on it that you want to show on the TV, without needing the files to be in the library long term. This would be great on a system where you just wanted to automatically mount all drives somewhere in /media/ so that Kodi can access the files. First attempt: usbmountįirst, I tried a tool called usbmount. Not only that, but they must be mounted at the same location each time, otherwise the file locations will change and the media library will break. I need them to be mounted so that the files can be shared via NFS.

When I plug these in, they will be given a drive number by the kernel (like /dev/sdb) but they won't be mounted automatically. Firstly, to clarify the problem: I have a set of external drives containing media files that I want to export via NFS. I'll briefly cover what didn't work, as I think it's useful to know if you don't care and just want to know 'the answer' then feel free to skip ahead. I tried a couple of other solutions along the way that didn't work before finally finding a solution using udev. This is the bit that took me the longest to figure out. Automatically mount external drives on consistent mount points My hard drives contain the media files in my library, so I need them to be mounted at consistent locations to avoid breaking Kodi's file indexing and the NFS shares. This part of the tutorial sets out a few different methods I've tried for auto-mounting known external hard drives, and the working solution I arrived at. Part 7: Firewall configuration with UFW.Part 3: Auto-mounting hard drives with Udev.

Part 1: Kodi installation and configuration.

Other parts of the tutorial may be found here: This is the third part of a multi-part tutorial describing how to configure the 'perfect' Kodi media centre running on top of ubuntu server.

Kodi for usb drive