From the project
EBSmount: Automatically mount EBS devices on Amazon EC2
The 2 most annoying things about Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Storage) I have found, is that there is no support to auto-attach an EBS on instance launch, and the need to manually mount an EBS when it's attached.
If the above annoys you as well, you're in luck! The first annoyance has been solved in the TurnKey Hub (private beta soon to be announced - request an invite here), and the second, well, is solved by EBSmount.
EBSmount is pre-installed on all the latest TurnKey AMI's, but should work without issue on any Ubuntu/Debian based system, or any other distribution that uses udev (with minor tweaks). The source code has been released on github, and the package is available in the TurnKey package archive.
Enough said, lets get to it.
EBSmount has 2 commands
ebsmount-udev Triggered by udev on EBS attach and detach ebsmount-manual Manually mount EBS device (simulates udev add trigger)
Features
- Automatically mounts EBS devices when they are attached (via udev)
- Supports formatted devices, as well as partitions
- Ignores unformatted devices and unsupported filesystems
- Device/partition uniquely identifiable mountpoints
- Configurable mount options
- Hooking scripts execution upon mount
- Convenience command for a one step format and mount
- Logging
Quick start
If the EBS device is not formatted, it will not be mounted automatically. For convenience, you can format and mount the device in one step, for example:
ebsmount-manual --format=ext3 /dev/sdf
Default configuration
/etc/ebsmount.conf
ENABLED=True
MOUNTDIR=/media/ebs
MOUNTOPTIONS=noatime
FILESYSTEMS=ext2 ext3
LOGFILE=/var/log/ebsmount.log
Unique mountpoints
Every EBS filesystem is mounted to its own uniquely identifiable mountpoint, based on:
$(MOUNTDIR)/$(basename PHYSDEVPATH)/$(FS_UUID)[:4]
For example:
/media/ebs/vbd-2160/a1b2
Hooking scripts
Once a filesystem is mounted, EBSmount will execute scripts located in MOUNTPOINT/.ebsmount in alpha-numeric ordering.
This provides a very powerful mechanism. In its simplest form, the user might want to symlink the mountpoint to a more accessible path, for example:
MOUNTPOINT/.ebsmount/10symlink
#!/bin/bash -e
target=/vol
mountp=$(dirname $(dirname $0))
[ ! -h $target ] && ln -s $mountp $target
Comments (8)
EBSmount depends on turnkey-pylib
Reply 1I found the following helpful
Reply 2I found the following helpful tip at this URL:
/forum/support/20100814/ebs-and-ec2
For easy access to your EBS I would recommend creating a symlink, something like this:
ln -s /media/ebs/vbd-2160/a1b2 /vol
Then, you can simply "cd /vol".
I hope the above helps.
Nope, no downside
Reply 3Nope, no downside, actually to the contrary, it's simpler and less error prone, so I'd recommend it. All our EBS's are formatted without partitions and are working great.
Thanks Alon for the quick
Reply 4Thanks Alon for the quick reply.
Is there any downside to not partitioning?
I had inadvertantly left out the partitioning step by the way. In fact, I didn't know that you could format a drive without partitioning it.
No, it doesn't partition the disk...
Reply 5No, it doesn't partition the disk. It just accepts the device you want to format/mount and does it's stuff. So in your case the full volume is being used -which is fine, and generally the way EBS volumes are used.
There isn't much point in partitioning an EBS device anyway, if you want another volume just create it. That is unless if you want to use RAID or LVM, but thats a whole other story...
This might sound like a
Reply 6This might sound like a stupid question, but I did not partition the EBS volume after I attached it to my turnkey appliance.
I then ran
ebsmount-manual --format=ext3 /dev/sdf
So basically, I formatted without partitioning.
I can see the volume and I have data there. By chance, does the command partition the drive when it does the formatting?
If I go into Webmin and look at "Partitions on local disks" it says "This disk has no partitions yet."
Use TurnKey!
Reply 7All interesting... Is there any "documentation" on this?
Reply 8I could see a real advantage in having "shared" access to one Network Drive between TKL Image installs.. Also, potentially the same for MySQL and/or even Windows systems looking at the same Drives so some databridges could be simplified (FoxPro to MySQL for instance).
Keep it up. The landscape is changing fast.
I should ask, what do we do if Alon and/or Liraz need to exit to something "bigger or better paying"? I would hate to see this all go away. It is really incredible the systems you have built with the bigger team!
EBSmount depends on turnkey-pylib, which provides the python module executil (as well as conffile). It is available as a deb package, and you can find the source code here.
Hope the above helps.