noatime automount

[Dave Hall]

On Thu, 2008-06-12 at 04:12 -0700, Slawek Drabot wrote:
> I like your idea of setting the noatime mount option and I was looking to set that for all my automounted USB disks, problem is, cannot find the location for setting automount preferences. I'm using 8.04 and notice there is no autofs process and my initial investigation points to gnome preferences.
> 
> Anyone played around with automount settings in 8.04?
> 
> "
> 3) Unless you specifically need access time stamps, mount the partition
> with the "noatime" option.  99% of users I know don't need atime stamps,
> and mounting with the noatime flag can reduce disk writes, I/O and
> general mount/unmount faults by a dramatic amount.  This is particularly
> true if you are a database user (any database - MySQL, Postgres, SQLite,
> or proprietary stuff).  Tagging the disk with a date stamp every time
> someone opens the file for read is not really necessary unless you have
> very specific security requirements in your business.  All other
> timestamps (including create and modify) are left alone by "noatime",
> and they work as expected.
> "

You can try editing /etc/hal/fdi/policy/preferences.fdi as root (or
using sudo).  It looks something like the xml at the bottom of this
message (this is based on hardy).  Please note I haven't tested this,
and if it doesn't work as expected, call Canonical not me ;)  You will
also need to reboot or run "sudo /etc/init.d/hal restart" after making
the changes, then plug in your USB key.  to see if it works run "mount"
in a terminal.

  <device>
    <match key="storage.hotpluggable" bool="false">
      <match key="storage.removable" bool="false">
        <merge key="storage.automount_enabled_hint" type="bool">false</merge>
      </match>
    </match>
  </device>

  <device> 
    <match key="block.is_volume" bool="true">
       <match key="@block.storage_device:storage.removable" bool="true">
          <merge key="volume.policy.mount_option.noatime" type="bool">true</merge>
        </match>
    </match>
  </device>

a follow up post to let others know if worked would be a nice touch :)

Cheers

Dave