Re: systemd, fstab, noauto and nofail
On Fri, Nov 21, 2014 at 05:51:47PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> As I understand it, sysvinit didn't care whether mountall.sh succeeded or
> failed.
This doesn't come from ignorance.
What can you do in this situation?
* throw your hands up, abort booting. Hope the admin enjoys a drive to
the datacenter (iDrac present and working? ha ha).
* continue booting, starting daemons in a best-effort attempt, hopefully
letting at least part of the system's functionality work. And most
important, the sysadmin can ssh in and fix the problem.
> So even if a bunch of mounts failed, it went on to boot the
> system, including everything that wasn't supposed to start until after all
> file systems were mounted.
There's currently no way to express which mounts are needed for which
functionality. Assuming all are needed works only for servers with a single
purpose. And even on a desktop -- if you got as far as mountall.sh, this
means most of the system works, and assuming no separate /usr, the user gets
his comfortable GUI with a running browser where he can google what the hell
the failure means.
> That meant that some folks have systems that they think are happily
> booting with sysvinit with a bunch of failing mounts, and, when they
> switch to systemd, things that declare a dependency on mounted file
> systems never start because the file systems aren't successfully mounted.
This sounds like a failure to provide a _non-fatal_ error message.
Solutions I'd propose:
* sysvinit: in mountall.sh, if a mount fails, store the failed fstab line
in a temp file. In a new init script that comes very late in the boot,
check if that file exists, if it does, mail it to root (mail-hating GUIs
like gnome have alternate messaging utilities, which I do not know).
* systemd: in preinst, check if any fstab lines without noauto or nofail
are not currently mounted -- if so, abort the installation as it would
result in an unbootable system.
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