ESX4 (linux in general) mounting / umounting USB drives

[The-Kevster]

Hi,

I've plugged a USB drive into ESX4 and the service console adds it as sdd and sdd1. I mount sdd1 and add/remove files for backup. I then umount the directory I previously mounted and remove the device. But the folders sdd and sdd1 still appear in /dev. In fact I've done this so many times I have sdd, sde, sdf, sdg, sdh, and sdi. Is this normal behavior in Linux or am I missing a command which removes it from the /dev directory? If this is normal how many times can I remove/add the device before there's a problem?

Thanks for your help,

Kev

[AndreTheGiant]

Is this normal behavior in Linux or am I missing a command which removes it from the /dev directory?

Probably is incorrect configuration of udev.

Usually Linux handle the add and remove correctly. But the Service Console is not a "real" Linux system (is works in a virtualized environment)...

Andre

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[Texiwill]

Hello,

This means there are probably persistent UDEV rules for the USB ports in use. Do an

ls /etc/udev/rules.d/*persistent*

. Then investigate any persistent file that looks to be 'disk' or 'usb' related. If you find one that contains 'sdd' then you can most likely remove that single file and next time the usb drive will be mounted as /dev/sdd.

However, this solely depends on udev and how the usb devices is actually mounted.

Best regards, Edward L. Haletky VMware Communities User Moderator, VMware vExpert 2009
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