Harddisk-Upgrade: /var/run and /var/lock not mounted tmpfs anymore

[Malte J. Wetz]

Hi!

I recently moved my Ubuntu Dapper from a PATA- to a SATA-Harddisk, 
using »cp -a« for all relevant filesystems as described in the 
Harddisk-Upgrade-HOWTO.

It worked fine except for one thing: On the new disk, the 
directories /var/run and /var/lock are not automatically mounted as tmpfs 
on boot anymore.

This caused some other minor problems, i.e. the Initskript 'mountall.sh' 
complains that the special devices /dev/shm/var.{lock,run} do not exist and 
the Loopback-Network is not brought up because of problems 
with /var/run/network/ifstate.

As I understand it from looking into the Initskripts, 'mountvirtfs' should 
do the mounts of /var/run und /var/lock. Since /proc and /sys are mounted 
and I can see a test echo string I included in the script, I can conclude 
that the script itself and the relevant section are beeing executed.

,----[ /etc/init.d/mountvirtfs ]
| [...]
| # Mount standard /proc and /sys.
| domount $TYPE /proc
| domount sysfs /sys
| 
| echo "***************************** BOOO! ************************"
|
| # Mount /var/run and /var/lock as tmpfs.
| # /var may be on another drive so create /var/run if we need to
| domount tmpfs /var/run "-o mode=0755"
| domount tmpfs /var/lock "-o mode=1777"
| [...]
`----

I can see no error message about this issue and the logs contain no 
suspicious entries.

Manually invoking '/etc/rcS.d/S01mountvirtfs start' after boot works, 
however. Of course, I loose half of my pid files and other stuff that was 
created earlier in the underlying filesystem. But it works.

If I boot directly into a shell (kernel parameter 'init=/bin/bash') and then 
call 'mountvirtfs' directly, it also works.

But during normal system bootup, /var/{lock,run} remain unmounted.

Currently, I solved this by adding appropriate entries to /etc/fstab. This 
way, 'mountvirtfs' still fails, but 'mountall.sh' takes over.

This works for me but I'm still curious as to why this strange behaviour 
occurs in the first place.

Note: /, /var and /home are seperate filesystems, all reiserfs, no lvm, no 
raid, self-compiled kernel 2.6.17.11 without initrd.

-- 
Malte J. Wetz  <mail at malte-wetz.de>
Homepage: www.malte-wetz.de (PGP/GPG Keys available on homepage)