Adding a new drive / fstab

[V. Alex Brennen]

On Wed, 2008-07-09 at 11:50 -0400, Labitt, Bruce wrote:
> In the endless pursuit of upgrading this machine I have added a hard
> drive to my computer.  I have used fdisk to create a linux partition to
> the whole disk.  I made the disk use the ext3 file system.
> 
> So now for fstab.  What is the philosophy for creating an entry?  At
> this point I'm not sure what the mount point should be.  /home sounds
> ok, but I would like the drive to be the "home" for my linux image for
> my blade server.

I think the best thing to do may be to create a mount point for the
drive under the '/mnt' directory.  Perhaps, given the usage plan you
described for this disk '/mnt/sys_imgs' (or something similar) is
appropriate.

A very long explanation why:

Many years ago, when new *nix systems were open popping up rather
frequently,  there was an attempt to create a unified standard (which
eventually became the POSIX standard).  One of the core components of
that standard was the file system (layout) structure.

The file system layout structure standardization was undertaken in order
to make it easier for people who found themselves working on many very
different flavors.  Those people included  developers who were creating
applications, for companies training users, and also system
administrators.

The portion of the standard consisted of many points including the
following:
  - /tmp  used by users for temporary user data
  - /var/tmp  used by applications for temporary data
  - /bin, /sbin, /lib  used for programs necessary for boot
  - /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/lib  used for OS programs not 
      necessary for boot and user installed software
  - /var  variable data
  - /mnt  used to mount remote file systems and directories 
      that were not part of the standard.

The idea was that if you had to perform an operating system upgrade, you
knew you would not step on the 3rd party vendor program you just
installed at some user's request.  Likewise, while installing a program
for that user you know you didn't have to worry about it installing over
a program in '/bin' that you need to boot your system.  This was
extremely useful because vendor apps often required different versions
of the same libraries and programs than the system required to boot.

The idea behind using '/mnt' was that it would be easy for an admin to
avoid backing up a number of file systems twice if they ware remotely
mounted under a single directory by excluding that directory with the
tar argument for doing just that.  A sysadmin would also know that a
disk error was with a secondary disk and not one of the primary OS disks
that could render the system unbootable.

So, that's why I suggest using a directory under '/mnt'.  Although, a
directory under '/usr/share' or '/usr/local/share' may also be
appropriate.

Here is the wikipedia page on that portion of the POSIX Standard (the
FHS: Filesystem Hierarchy Standard):

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard


     - VAB
-
V. Alex Brennen       vab at mit.edu
Senior UNIX Systems Administrator
MIT Libraries   E25-131   x3-9327
       http://vab.mit.edu/