[Bug 614662] Re: A better mountall

[Gerald Villemure]

The point of the mountall2 script was to introduce the idea of a more
intelligent booting process, with pre and post mount hooks and the
ability to check the progress of the FSCK remotely.

I shied away from using the nobootwait option because I needed a
postmount script to restart some services once the filesystem gets
online.

If the original mountall generates UPSTART events, then I supposed it is
possible to trigger a post-mount script that way.

Gérald

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/614662

Title:
  A better mountall

Status in “mountall” package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: mountall

  The current implementation of mountall in Lucid is rather dangerous if
  you don't have console access.

  It will effectively hang your boot process if anything goes wrong. (MD
  did not get assembled, data drive is offline, etc.)  If you don’t have
  console access to press "s", your out of luck.

  For those like me that administer their server remotely the historic
  solution was to ensure serial console access. But even then, you don’t
  see anything when connecting, so you can press "s" and HOPE for the
  best.

  There is another issue here, the fundamental idea that a system is an
  all or nothing solution.  Why is it that the data drive needs to be
  online and mounted BEFORE I can get SSH access?  I have systems that
  run both Asterisk and Samba and I find it inappropriate that Asterisk
  needs to WAIT for Samba’s Data drive to get online before Asterisk can
  start. We need a SMARTER start process that is NOT all or nothing, it
  is OKAY to mount some filesystems later when they are ready, and not
  hold up the whole system.

  I wrote a small script called "mountall2" which mounts the non-root
  filesystems later in the boot process (last actually) and does so in a
  way that make diagnostics and recovery POSSIBLE.

  Every filesystem is FSCK and MOUNTED just like mountall but it is done
  in parallel and inside a "screen" session.  If you have console you
  can check the FSCK progress on TTY13+ by pressing <RIGHTALT>+<F1> etc.
  But if you don’t have physical access to the machine you can SSH into
  the box and use "screen –x .." to see the FSCK progress.

  The script will also call postmount scripts if present since there are
  times where you will need to notify NFS or some other app that the
  filesystem is now online.  Ideally upstart scripts could be predicated
  on a filesystem being available and auto start the task when the FS
  come online.

  To use, untar the script somewhere like /usr/local and add this line to /etc/rc.local:
    /usr/local/mountall2/mountall2 &
  Then edit your /etc/fstab to add the noauto options and set the FSCK field to a 3
  Original setup:
    UUID=b97af687-8a45-4197-89d4-fb62b4feb0d1 /boot ext4  defaults          0       2
  New setup:
    UUID=b97af687-8a45-4197-89d4-fb62b4feb0d1 /boot ext4  defaults,noauto   0       3

  The "noauto" option will prevent the native "mountall" from touching
  the entry. The FSCK check of 3 is a simple way of saying it should be
  check at the end of the system boot sequence.

  The postmount scripts need to have the same name as the mount point
  with the / converted to underscores _, so if your mount point is
  "/mnt/test" then create a file "postmount/_mnt_test" script with your
  commands.  There is a sample "postmount/_Media" in the tar file.

  Hopefully something of similar functionality will become integrated
  into the distro.

  Gérald

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