[systemd-devel] automount unit that never fails?

[Lennart Poettering]

On Fri, 04.11.16 09:38, Bjørn Forsman (bjorn.forsman at gmail.com) wrote:

> Hi Lennart,
> 
> On 3 November 2016 at 20:19, Lennart Poettering <lennart at poettering.net> wrote:
> > Your mail does not say in any way what precisely your issue is?
> 
> Did you read the first post? I hope not, because I don't really know
> how to describe it more precisely than that :-)
> 
> Below is a copy of the first post.
> 
> When a mount unit fails (repeatedly), it takes the corresponding
> automount unit down with it. To me this breaks a very nice property
> I'd like to have:
> 
>   A mountpoint should EITHER return the mounted filesystem OR return an error.
> 
> As it is now, when the automount unit has failed, programs accessing
> the mountpoint will not receive any errors and instead silently access
> the local filesystem. That's bad!
> 
> I don't consider using mountpoint(1) or "test
> mountpoint/IF_YOU_SEE_THIS_ITS_NOT_MOUNTED" proper solutions, because
> they are out-of-band.
> 
> I was thinking of adding Restart=always to the automount unit, but
> that still leaves a small timeframe where autofs is not active. So
> that's not ideal either. Also, using Restart= implies a proper .mount
> unit instead of /etc/fstab, but GVFS continuously activates autofs
> mounts unless the option "x-gvfs-hide" is in /etc/fstab. So I'm kind
> of stuck with /etc/fstab until that GVFS issue is solved.
> 
> So the question is, what is the reason for the mount unit to take down
> the automount? I figure the automount should simply never fail.

Consider turning off the start limits of the mount unit if you don't
want systemd to give up eventually.

Use StartLimitInterval= and StartLimitBurst= in the mount unit file
for that.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat