[Bug 610869] Re: mountall ignores nofail mount option

[Steve Langasek]

I don't think I've misunderstood anyone here, though I may have
misunderstood the code.  Also, I don't think everyone commenting on this
bug report actually has the same goals.

There are three orthogonal aspects of boot behavior that users may wish to configure here.
 - whether to hold up the boot waiting for a device (nobootwait/bootwait)
 - how long to wait for the device before concluding it's not going to show up ("timeout=n" in theory... in practice, timeout + --dev-wait-time=N)
 - what to do if a waited-for device hits the timeout: throw an error, or continue without? ("nofail", in theory)

So a more careful inspection of the code shows me that 'timeout' doesn't
directly do anything useful; all it does is cause an event to be
emitted, it doesn't interact with 'nofail' at all or otherwise allow the
boot to proceed noninteractively if the device is absent.

In theory, what you *could* do with the existing functionality is create
a job which is 'start on device-not-ready MOUNTPOINT=$MOUNTPOINT' and
calls 'mntctl change-mount none $MOUNTPOINT'.  E.g.:

  start on device-not-ready MOUNTPOINT=/opt/vms
  exec mntctl change-mount none $MOUNTPOINT

But when I test this I get an assertion failure from NIH.  So I guess
this code hasn't been adequately tested.  Anyway, I wouldn't recommend
this as the right way to do this, but was hoping to be able to offer it
as a workaround.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/610869

Title:
  mountall ignores nofail mount option

Status in “mountall” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: mountall

  mountall ignores nofail mount option. Ubuntu can not be started if
  external sas device is down, for example.

  Description:	Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS
  Release:	10.04

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