[Bug 575293] Re: mountall trying to check mounts with pass=0

[Steve Langasek]

Ok;  the error message for fsck.cifs has been resolved now via bug
#838091.  I don't know if mountall is still trying to find fsck for
filesystems with pass=0 set - it's not meant to, and the code is written
to specifically avoid fscking them.

> The bug now is the same underlying problem, that during the initial pass
> though fstab to do any file system checks during booting it is trying to
> mount the CIFS systems which (a) won't work as networking, etc, is not
> up yet, and (B) the log-in credentials are missing as they are on my
> /home partition, also not mounted yet.

So I don't agree that a) is a problem.  networking *may or may not* be
up at the time mountall first tries to mount the filesystems; and
networking may be *partially* up, but the route to the required server
may not be up yet.  mountall cannot sanely determine the "right" time to
try to mount the network filesystems, so it does the only reasonable
thing and tries to mount them at startup, and if that fails, tries to
mount them again each time a network device comes up (and signals
mountall with SIGUSR1).

b) however means that you have a dependency between your mounts, and
that's not something that mountall is designed to cope with.  It's not
going to introspect the fstab options for each filesystem type to detect
when a mount has dependencies on files stored on other filesystems.  For
your use case, I think the only appropriate solution is to mark the
filesystem 'noauto' and use an upstart like this to mount it at the
right time:

  start on mounted MOUNTPOINT=/home and network-device-up IFACE=$my_interface
  task
  pre-start exec mount /media/swdev

We could conceivably *also* hide the error messages from mount rather
than displaying them since we know that in many cases they will be
spurious; but then how do we ensure debuggability of the system when
there really is a problem with a network mount?

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/575293

Title:
  mountall trying to check mounts with pass=0

Status in “mountall” package in Ubuntu:
  Incomplete
Status in “mountall” source package in Lucid:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: mountall

  When testing the automated check of file systems with 10.04 LTS
  release version, it seems that mountall 2.14 is going through all
  entries in fstab and trying to check all of my CIFS mounts with <dump>
  and <pass> set to zero, generated warnings in boot.log about the
  missing fsck.* programs.

  Also I expected the messages to be in /var/log/fsck/checkfs and
  fsck/checkroot rather than boot.log (which is also a bug I noticed in
  Ubuntu 9.10)

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