Public SourceMage Discussion List

[nealbirch <nealbirch AT attbi.com>]

Arwed von Merkatz wrote:
> Hi,
>
> i think many people have the problem that with the 'user' directive in
> /etc/fstab, a user can mount a cdrom (or any other filesystem using
> 'user'), but not unmount it. The workaround was using the 'users'
> directive, but then every user can unmount it, not only the user that
> mounted it.
>
> I googled a bit and found a lfs hint about that:
> http://hints.nl.linuxfromscratch.org/hints/mtab.txt
>
> The problem is caused by /etc/mtab being a symlink to /proc/mounts,
> making it a regular file solves this.
>
> in short:
> cd /etc
> rm mtab
> touch mtab
> chown root:root mtab
> chmod 644 mtab
> mount -f /
> mount -f /proc
> mount -af
>
> that did it for me, the lfs hint contains some information about how the
> mounting at bootup should work, i looked at our mount.sh, and it seems
> it does all that.

That's a good discussion of what we already mostly do on that page. 
(Except we leave the "-F" out of the mount command in the mount.sh as it 
allows mount points be created out of order, and put it in the 
mountnfs.sh so network timeouts will be down asynchronically, if that's 
the right word.) The lower case "-f" fakes a mount, which writes the 
mtab entry after you have cleared the mtab.

Mount and fstab are two man pages everyone who uses linux should get 
real familiar with. I probably need to add a page to the init.d spell 
some help or warning option concerning the fstab because a lot of 
problems can be created if you try and mount things out of order.

Were you just commenting on a general condition outside of Sourcemage? 
Or was there some action that we needed to look at specifically on this 
to improve our distro?

Neal

--
"You can fool some of the people all of the time
--and those are the ones you have to concentrate on!"
GW Bush-- from the N.Y. Times