Purpose of fstab?

[Ace69]

I am at work now and I don't have access to my Linux box and I have been having some troubles with mounting and /etc/fstab.

I was just curious as to what fstab's purpose was with mounting.

Ace

[Molecule Man]

It gives a list of of partions or drives that are to be mounted at boot time and with what options. It also allows for regular mount points to be mounted and who is allowed to mount them.

[Stween]

/etc/fstab basically holds information on partitions which the system has access to, where these partitions are mounted on the filesystem, various options (to mount automatically on startup, etc) and various permissions...

On startup the system mounts the filesystems it is told to in /etc/fstab.

Don't mess with it if you dont know what you are doing, you could seriously screw up your system :)

[jscott]

What is the purpose of X?

Wherein X is an command, config file, etc:


man X

[fancypiper]

The filesystem table (/etc/fstab) file tells linux what filesystems are on your system (floppy, cdrom, cdr hard drives and some other things) and their partitioning scheme, where they are to be mounted on the directroy, who has permission to use them and the fsck scheduling.

[Ace69]

OK, thank you for the replies. The reason that I asked is because I tried to create a mount shortcut on my desktop and it said that it was not specified in fstab. I went in and manually added the two partitions and it works ok now, but I do not want the filesystems added upon boot.

I don't have to have the filesystems mounted upon boot to mount them do I?

Ace

[fancypiper]

No, but it must be in fstab and the mount point must exist to be able to mount it with some utilities (usermount for example).

From the man page referenced above (to see a man page,open a terminal and type man <some command orconfiguration file name>. Some GUI interfaces are available for man pages as well):


The fourth field, (fs_mntops), describes the mount options associated with the filesystem.

It is formatted as a comma separated list of options. It contains at least the type of mount plus any additional options appropriate to the filesystem type. For documentation on the available options for non-nfs file systems, see mount(8). For documentation on all nfs-specific options have a look at nfs(5). Common for all types of file system are the options ``noauto'' (do not mount when "mount -a" is given, e.g., at boot time), and ``user'' (allow a user to mount). For more details, see mount(8).

[ 18 June 2001: Message edited by: fancypiper ]

[Ace69]

Thanks fancypiper, I will just set the partitions to noauto then!

I appreciate it.

Ace