It's been a long time since I blogged. What made me come out of hibernation?

Demonoid, the popular BitTorrent tracker has been shut down. It says :

The CRIA threatened the company renting the servers to us, and because of this it is not possible to keep the site online. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your understanding.

It's come up on Slashdot and Digg. CRIA is apparently -

The Canadian Recording Industry Association is a non-profit trade organization that was founded in 1964 to represent the interests of American companies that create, manufacture and market sound recordings in Canada. The organization is based in Toronto.

CRIA is governed by a board of directors who are elected annually by CRIA members. To be eligible for election a candidate for the board must be among the chief executive officers of member companies of the organization. Graham Henderson (Universal Music Canada) is the current president of the CRIA.

according to the Wikipedia article. There are subsections in the article on the 1st Demonoid shutdown and the second Demonoid shutdown. Vandal edits (technically they're not Vandal edits because policy says "Even harmful edits that are not explicitly made in bad faith are not considered vandalism. For example, adding a personal opinion to an article once is not vandalism — it's just not helpful, and should be removed or restated.") are already appearing in the Wikipedia :D ( examples 1 , 2 ).

Down with CRIA.

Using Windows partitions from Debian GNU/Linux

My friend Arun recently blogged about Automounting filesystems in Linux from a Fedora perspective. For those of you who want an alternative method (especially Debian users), here goes...

I'll explain how I did it - it's much easier to understand from an example.

First of all, I used fdisk so I could know which were all the partitions in my system and what they were called.

debian-indraprastha:/home/anirudh# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 40.0 GB, 40060403712 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4870 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 1912 15358108+ c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda2 1913 3960 16450560 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda3 3961 4870 7309575 83 Linux
/dev/sda5 1913 3187 10241406 b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda6 3917 3960 353398+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7 3188 3916 5855661 83 Linux

Now take the first entry. That partition is called /dev/sda1 and is the C: drive on Windows. Now I use the mount command to mount the partition. Mounting means that I attach a physical device to a directory, so that the directory itself becomes the device. It's a concept that you get used to once you are familiar with all this. To mount the partition, I need a mount point. This is any directory that I create.

debian-indraprastha:/home/anirudh# mkdir /disks/c

Now I mount /dev/sda1 to /disks/c

debian-indraprastha:/home/anirudh# mount /dev/sda1 /disks/c

You can check if it has been mounted using the df command.

debian-indraprastha:/home/anirudh# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3 6.9G 4.7G 1.9G 71% /
tmpfs 253M 0 253M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda5 9.8G 7.9G 1.9G 81% /disks/d
/dev/sda7 5.5G 4.6G 702M 87% /disks/s7
tmpfs 10M 716K 9.4M 7% /dev
/dev/sda1 15G 13G 2.4G 84% /disks/c

See the last entry? That shows that /dev/sda1 (the C: drive) has been mounted on /disks/c. Its total size is 15 GB of which 84%(13GB) has been used and 2.4GB is available.

Now there's a file called /etc/fstab that comes in very handy. This mounting business is temporary. It gets "unmounted" after I shutdown. I would like to automatically mount it each time. I do that by modifying the /etc/fstab file. The /etc/fstab file keeps static information about the filesystems(refer $man fstab). Another file that comes in handy is /etc/mtab. This file keeps info about all the devices that have been mounted. After I mount /dev/sda1, an entry is made in /etc/mtab automatically.

/dev/sda1 /disks/c vfat rw 0 0

Now I copy this line into my /etc/fstab, with some modifications.

/dev/sda1 /disks/c vfat auto,exec,rw 0 0

Now each time the system boots, that drive will be mounted automatically.

Now, suppose I don't want it to be mounted now? I use unmount.

debian-indraprastha:/home/anirudh# umount /dev/sda1

To disable the mounting of the paritition automatically, just remove that particular entry from /etc/fstab or uncomment it.

Have fun :-)