USB Drive - Ubuntu Server 18.04 (Mount USB storage devices available to the system)

Description:

Why? Mounting USB disk drives in Linux is a common task. In my case, Ubuntu servers; found it is quite a tedious task...

• Needed a quick and simple command to mount only USB storage devices.
• Ensure critical storage (e.g. ZFS pools) and other devices on the servers were not touched.

What?

Simple bash script to mount any and all available USB drive partitions by invoking a simple command .

• The program enumerates available USB disk partitions and mountpoints.

  • The program will look for and mount ONLY USB storage devices.
  • It can easily be expanded to mount other disk types (not tested).

• Mountpoint:

  • The LABEL of the partition is used; if it exists.
    • Mountpoin is set to /media/$LABEL. (It can be set to any other folder if needed).
    • A folder named $LABEL (disk's label) is created if it does not exist.
  • If the partition does not have a label, the program will attempt to use USB$NAME (USB + Partition logical block name)
    • e.g. /media/USBsdb1

• Filesystem:

  • It's chosen by looking at the filesystem of the partition itself.
    • e.g. ntfs, ext4, etc.

• Logs: Added logging and conf file as I was initially planning on having it run as a daemon with more functionality, but realized it was unnecessary.

1. Label your USB disk partitions as you want to be mounted by the system.
2. Install script at /usr/local/bin (for convenience)
3. Run command:
   • ud -a [add: mount partitions of USB disks connected to the system]
   • ud -c [check: check what USB drives are available in the system]

Only tested on Ubuntu Server 18.04