Very, very, VERY weird event

[Karl Auer]

Here's a good one.

I logged into my home server to start a backup. Ran "mount" to see if
the backup disk had mounted itself. It had - but two other USB HDDs
normally mounted on boot were apparently not mounted! Argh! Home
directories and a bunch of other stuff are on those drives, so this was
a big problem.

Note: The "mount" command showed no drives mounted except the internal
HDD.

I thought "darn, things will have been written to the mount points on
the internal HDD", and sure enough, lots of files were visible under the
mount points. So to see what sort of job I had ahead of me, I ran "du
-s" on one of the mount points - and it said there were 57GB of data
under it.

Note: The internal HDD has one partition, of 10GB. "df -k" reported only
3GB used.

I placed a new file in the mount point directory, and rebooted. The
external HDDs mounted as normal - and the new file was visible on the
mounted drive! Everything seems back to normal as far as I can tell.

So it looks to me as if the drives were mounted all along, but the
"mount" utility was not reporting them.

Google is not much help because all the terms are so common (mount, USB
etc).

Is this something anyone else has seen? Are there any reliable ways to
see what's mounted apart from the "mount" command? I stupidly didn't
check /proc/mounts...

Regards, K.
 
-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer
http://twitter.com/kauer389

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