[NTLUG:Discuss] hard drive madness |SOLUTION

[Chris Cox]

On Wed, 2009-09-23 at 07:49 -0500, Monty Shinn wrote:
...
> Interesting - I always thought that mtab was a table of mounted 
> filesystems that got populated at boot, not a table of filesystems to 
> mount at boot.

It's populated when mounts are made.  At boot or otherwise.  Whenever a
mount is done (however that is done).

> For instance, if I unmount my nfs mounts, they are removed from mtab. 
> Remounting the nfs mounts causes them to be listed in mtab again. 
> Indeed, when I have had stale nfs mounts, I have just deleted the entry 
> in mtab, then remounted.

Or ideally, you can call umount, depends on version and config...

> 
>  >>man mtab<< returned nothing - literally.
> 

man mount
You can read there (hopefully) about the relationship or lack thereof
between /etc/mtab and /proc/mounts as well.


> Is mtab used differently across distros?  I'm running Fedora.  Centos 
> appears to act the same, which would be expected.

Should be pretty much the same now... I'm curious about where it is
different.  I think there was a time when distros did link /etc/mtab
to /proc/mounts.  man mount tries to explain.