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Re: ext3 not mounting (ghost mounts created)



Thedore Knab wrote:
> 
> What did I do wrong to prevent the proper mounting of multiple /var/*
> directories ?
> 
<SNIP, fstab trimmed for readability...
> # /etc/fstab: static file system information.
> #
> # <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options> <dump>  <pass>
> /dev/hda2   /       ext3    defaults,errors=remount-ro      0   1
> /dev/hda3   none            swap    sw                      0   0
> proc        /proc           proc    defaults                0   0
> #/dev/fd0   /floppy         auto    defaults,user,noauto    0   0
> #/dev/cdrom /cdrom          iso9660 defaults,ro,user,noauto 0   0
> /dev/hda1   /boot ext3 rw                                   0   2
> /dev/hda5   /home ext3 rw                                   0   2
> /dev/hda6   /var/log ext3 rw                                0   2
> #source for idea
> #http://www.stahl.bau.tu-bs.de/~hildeb/postfix/ext3.shtml
> /dev/hda8   /var/spool ext3 rw,data=journal,noatime         0   2
> /dev/hda7   /var ext3 rw                                    0   2
> /dev/hda9   /usr ext3 rw                                    0   2
> 

There's your problem... you can't mount /var/spool or /var/log until
/var is mounted, so you need to change your fstab so that you mount /var
first.  This is done through the <pass> field (the number in the last
column of /etc/fstab). See how <swap> is pass 0, then "/" is pass 1,
then the other partitions are on pass 2. Change so that "/var/spool" and
"/var/log" are mounted in pass 3, and life is good. 

The man pages for mount and fstab aren't very clear about this gotcha,
but it makes sense if you think about it... let's say you didn't mount
/var, and tried to mount /var/local/some/path/name. Where would/should
that end up? Should your machine magically create the
/var/local/some/path/name? What if you later mounted /var/local/some
which had directories path/ foo/ and bar/? etc. etc. 

when you manually remounted your spool and log partitions, you had a
mounted and running /var partition, that's why remounting manually
cleared that up...


--Rich

_________________________________________________________
                         
Rich Puhek               
ETN Systems Inc.         
_________________________________________________________



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