[systemd-devel] /etc/fstab obsolete?

[Ulrich Windl]

Hi!

systemd in SLES 12 is causing endless frustration here:

Yesterday I was migrating some filesystems to a new device (multipath, MD-RAID, LVM, filesystem, mountpoints, etc.), updating /etc/fstab and other files as needed.
After migration was successful, I also cleaned up the now obsolete resources (multipath, MD-RAID, filesystem, mountpoints, etc.)
Everything looked OK...

But some time later the application was stopped, as the new filesystems were unmounted by systemd (even though active processes were using it) WITHOUT giving a reason for "Stopped target Local File Systems" in syslog. Instead systemd tried to mount the filesystems that had been removed from /etc/fstab!

It seems systemd does not like root to unmount a filesystem that is still present in /etc/fstab.

So I tried to "start local filesystems" after realizing the problem this morning. Then disaster (named "systemd") strikes back:
It tried to mount the old filesystems that do no longer exist (and are no longer present in /etc/fstab), resulting in a "dependency failed", and in turn it transitioned a fully running server from multi-user mode to emergency mode, shutting down all services, network, etc.

That is why I hate systemd!

I did a "daemon-reload" in the emergency shell, and then I was able to start the default target again.

Regards,
Ulrich