i should be working (but i'm fixing my computer).

In our last episode, we were valiantly trying to make an external USB drive function as a shared NFS drive. There was also another purpose -- whenever the connection to the Windows server drive is lost, Amarok rebuilds its music collection, running the processor to 100% for lengthy periods of time, threatening to fry the music server computer. Eeeek!

...

So, our plan was to use an external usb drive -- actually connected to the music server -- as the music storage device. How novel!

The hole in the plan was that every time I rebooted the music server computer, the usb drive decided to mount in a different location.

So, noticing that the two partitions seemingly switched (randomly) between mounting one of two locations, we tried to establish NFS client mounts for each, anticipating this would provide disk resources in one of two places, all the time.

Seemingly the plan was working.

Oh, I know, it was not the RIGHT plan. The correct plan was to create a UUID mount in fstab so the usb drive would always mount up in the same location. But, my experiment with UUID was a failure due to multiple layers of stupidity.

And, you know, "if it works, don't fix it."

Although, inevitably, that means it won't work some other [more inconvenient] time.

So, today for unknown reasons the Amarok connection died. But, seemingly it was reconnected just like every other time, and Amarok was "rebuilding" the collection. The progress report showed it was really doing this. Percentage by percentage, it informed me the rebuild was underway.

But, unfortunately, it wasn't. At 100%, which is to say, complete, it still wouldn't work and commenced rebuilding AGAIN. And the processor temp was at 205 deg. F! (Computer still working, though ...)

I suspected something was awry. So, I messed with the server, but then I felt it was time to re-tackle Plan A, which was -- after all -- to get the usb drive to remember its location so Amarok could latch onto that drive instead. (The internal drive is way too small to do the job and I don't wish to replace it because it is an older computer.)

The next thing I noticed was that I had lost my NFS connections, which had been working fine for several days (and several reboots). What? The drive is still mounting in the same location still appears in the YAST NFS client setup, but it won't connect. There must be "secret stuff" that is getting scrambled when the partitions swap mount points.

Okay, enough is enough.

Back to trying to get a UUID fstab connection to work. (There would be a side benefit if I could also make this work in grub -- the drive is actually formatted as an external Linux drive, but as I sadly discovered, it could not be reliably re-booted, since it showed up in a different mount point each re-boot.)

Also, although I had repeatedly read about using the UUID for mounting the partitions, I had noticed that OpenSUSE actually installed fstab using "disk-id" mounts. And, I had experimented with this before.

But, every time I tried to get the partitions to mount with fstab, I got an fstab error. What?

Finally, as the mist began to clear, I noticed something. I had (repeatedly) put a comma between the sixth and seventh columns of the fstab entry. As in "0,1" instead of "0 1".

Progress made. Still not mounting, but fstab no longer being reported as defective.

More tinkering. Successful mount.

Now, I did not specifically track down which partitions I wanted, eg. "sdb1, sdb2" or whatever. I went to /dev/disk/by-uuid and copied the one that linked to sbd2, mounted it, took a look at what was at the mount point. Then discovered I really wanted sdb3. Whatever. So, I tried the same thing with /dev/disk/by-id/.

Yay, it works.

Yay, the NFS client mounts up.

Yay, I can see the drive.

I think progress has been made.

Or not.

But, I had a little diversion. The vent on my drier clogged up with lint. Oh, I know, you are thinking, this is not a computer problem, why do we care.

That is what I am thinking too. But not what the wife was thinking. Her focus was more on soggy clothes and burning down houses. So, I had to remove the lint clogging the vent.

Not fun. See ya later...