[NBLUG/talk] Wierdness with fstab (on FC5) and noauto

[Jeff Coffler]

Howdy,

I noted (much to my chagrin) that an entry in /etc/fstab, if the disk 
isn't in the system, will keep the system from booting up.  Bummer.  I 
wasn't aware of that behavior.

I changed fstab to specify noauto, and this still keeps the system from 
booting up.

What's happening is this: I have two drives (Offsite-A and Offsite-B).  
Only one of them is in the system at a time.  The other one is sitting 
in a safe deposit box (it's my offsite backup mechanism).

When I change a disk, I dismount the old drive, hot swap the new drive 
in, then do a "mount -a".  But obviously, that won't work if it keeps 
the system from starting up!

My entries in fstab have been:

LABEL=Offsite-A        /mnt/offsite-a          ext3    
defaults,noauto          1 2
LABEL=Offsite-B        /mnt/offsite-b          ext3    
defaults,noauto          1 2

When that didn't work, I tried:

LABEL=Offsite-A        /mnt/offsite-a          ext3    noauto          1 2
LABEL=Offsite-B        /mnt/offsite-b          ext3    noauto          1 2

That didn't work either.  The only thing that allowed the system to boot 
was to simply comment out the entries.

Offsite-A is currently in the system, so Offsite-B isn't found.

I can think of two ways to solve this:

1) Write a two line script:

mount -L Offsite-A /mnt/offsite-a
mount -L Offsite-B /mnt/offsite-b

Then have that run at system boot time (via chkconfig or something).

2) Perhaps consider something like autofs (although I'm not sure how 
that works with a physical hard drive - do I just yank it out without 
warning the system, even if the disk is mounted RW?)

3) Other ideas?

Thanks,

    -- Jeff