Automount with systemd o openRC

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Mount Hard Disk

Create mount service with systemd

Create a file home-user-data.mount with the following content:

[Unit]
Description=Mount USB disk
[Mount]
What=/dev/disk/by-uuid/00000000-0000-0000-0000-00000000
Where=/home/gallochri/data
Type=ext4
Options=defaults,rw,noatime
TimeoutSec=10
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.targe

Copy to /etc/systemd/system/ and rename to the correct path.

$ cp home-user-data.mount_template /etc/systemd/system/home-gallochri-data.mount

Edit .mount service file

[Unit]
Description= # Unit description

[Mount]
What= # Disk by UUID
Where= # Where you want the device mounted
#Type= # FS type (optional)
#Options= # Options (fstab option, optional)
#TimeoutSec=seconds # How long systemd should wait for the mount command to finish (optional)

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

What=

List disk

$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda 8:0 0 2.7T 0 disk
└─sda1 8:1 0 2.7T 0 part
sdb 8:16 0 232.9G 0 disk
├─sdb1 8:17 0 512M 0 part /boot/firmware
└─sdb2 8:18 0 232.4G 0 part /

Get UUID

$ lsblk -no UUID /dev/sda1
0776c720-2fed-434d-b537-025ba4293f62

Where=

Path where you want the device mounted, if the path do not exist it will be created with 755 owned by root.

Automount disk with Systemd

Create a home-user-data.automount file with the following content:

[Unit]
Description=Automount backup partition

[Automount]
Where=/home/gallochri/data
TimeoutIdleSec=10

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

copy it to /etc/systemd/system/ and rename to the correct path.

$ cp home-user-data.automount /etc/systemd/system/home-gallochri-data.automount

Mount and enable automount:

$ sudo systemctl enable home-gallochri-data.mount --now
$ sudo systemctl enable home-gallochri-data.automount --now

Create a mount service with OpenRC

On Alpine Linux:

~ # blkid
/dev/sdb1: UUID="205e1362-81ba-4798-aff7-83aa88a96ea6" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda3: UUID="f8714de2-ab41-49b5-ad20-93dfbcc703dd" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda2: UUID="fe7e53b7-c543-44b8-97f1-28fc29680457" TYPE="swap"
/dev/sda1: UUID="C837-1EC5" TYPE="vfat"

Create a openRC script /etc/init.d/mount-usb:

#!/sbin/openrc-run

description="Mount USB disk"

start() {
 ebegin "Mounting USB disk"
 mkdir -p /home/gallochri/data
 mount /dev/sdb1 /home/gallochri/data
 eend $?
}

stop() {
 ebegin "Unmounting USB disk"
 umount /home/gallochri/data
 eend $?
}

make it executable and test

# chmod +x /etc/init.d/mount-usb
# rc-update add mount-usb boot
# rc-service mount-usb start