[systemd-devel] Antw: Re: Antw: Re: /etc/fstab obsolete?

[Dave Howorth]

On Thu, 29 Aug 2019 15:57:37 +0200
Lennart Poettering <lennart at poettering.net> wrote:
> On Do, 29.08.19 07:46, Ulrich Windl
> (Ulrich.Windl at rz.uni-regensburg.de) wrote:
> 
> > Hi!
> >
> > I agree to almost everything, except:
> >
> > The handling of /etc/fstab is a true mess. Maybe other config files
> > are handles similarly, but I haven't discovered.  For some reason
> > SLES does not set up a German keyboard in the mergency shell (just
> > to make things worse). I had opened a service request for that as
> > well.  Systemd "over-reacts" in most cases, like when being unable
> > to find some mount that root unmounted. Bringing the system to
> > emergency mode is clearly over-reacting.  
> 
> We do this for safety reasons. Please declare all your mounts as
> "nofail" and then systemd will boot up even without them being
> around. But of course things will fall apart badly then as soon as a
> device goes missing as all services will assume the file systems they
> need are there but potentially are just reading or writing to the file
> system undearneath.

There's an easy way around that. Change the permissions of the mount
directory to be very restrictive, such that whatever normally writes in
the mounted filesystem/directory can't. Then it's up to applications to
deal with read or write failures appropriately.

> "nofail" is an option that existed before systemd too, btw. It's how
> you declare that you want an /etc/fstab line not to cause failure.
> 
> > I have always been a fan of UNIX because of ist conceptual
> > simplicity, meaning it was easy to understand what's going on and
> > how things work (very much opposed to MS Windows, for example).  For
> > me systemd simply isn't UNIX.  
> 
> I can live with that.
> 
> Lennart
> 
> --
> Lennart Poettering, Berlin