Aside from the knowledge of mounting the USB thumbdrive, a more important question arises -- where is it mounted? These questions presume that Solaris supports thumbdrives and indeed it does, as we shall see in a bit.
Mount the USB thumbdrive. USB thumbdrives are emulated as SCSI hot-plug devices. They are under the control of the Solaris Volume Management daemon "vold". The same daemon is responsible for the floppy and CD/DVD optical devices.
Plug the drive to the USB port. Become super-user (root) or a privileged user (via sudo). The rest of the commands need elevated privileges. To check if the USB thumbdrive is detected, use cfgadm.
root@host # cfgadm ... ... usb0/2.0 usb-storage connected configured ok ... ...
The output above confirms that the USB thumbdrive is properly detected by the system.
The directory /rmdisk does not exist on a Solaris system by default. So it needs to be created.
root@host # mkdir /rmdisk
With the /rmdisk directory existing vold needs to be restarted, if it is started.
root@host # pkill -HUP vold
.. or started, if disabled.
» for Solaris 10
root@host # /etc/init.d/volmgt start
» for older Solaris versions
root@host # /etc/init.d/vold start
Verify that the device is found by vold.
root@host # volcheck -v media was found
The USB thumbdrive is now mounted in /rmdisk/rmdisk0.
Unmount the USB thumbdrive. Just like in Windows, the thumbdrive needs to be unplugged or unmounted properly.
To unmount the thumbdrive, run the command below:
root@host # volrmmount -e rmdisk0
Verify that the device is no longer detected by the system.
root@host # volcheck -v no media was found
There you go, the mounting and unmounting of a USB thumbdrive in Solaris. I hope this post answers the questions you may have about thumbdrives in Solaris.
Thumbdrives can be useful in Solaris as well.
