Re: PROPOSAL for FHS revised : Mount points for CDs, floppies and a lien OS partitions.]
Daniel Bradley wrote:
>
> It has been proposed that the mounts directory be off either "/" or
> "/var".
>
> I would personally prefer that the mounts directory be off "/" rather
> than under "/var" ....
> Also its more intuitive to look for a mounts directory under "/" than to
> have to look under "/var".
>
> However if anyone has any compelling arguments as to why it should be
> under "/var" i'm more than happy to be educated on the point.
My suggestion is that we say:
/misc
directory of mountpoints for removable media
/misc/fd0 ... /misc/fd9, /misc/floppy
mountpoints for floppy disk based filesystems
/misc/cd0 ... /misc/cd9, /misc/cd
mountpoints for cdrom based filesystems
/misc/cr0 ... /misc/cr9, /misc/cdr
mountpoints for cd-recordable based filesystems
/misc/crw0 ... /misc/crw9, /misc/cdrw
mountpoints for cd-rewriteable based filesystems
/misc/dv0 ... /misc/dv9, /misc/dvd
mountpoints for dvd-rom based filesystems
These mountpoints are optional. It is recommended that software should not
assume their existence, and use them only in exceptional circumstances,
such as software installation.
Begin Rationale
These mountpoints are mentioned here because it was felt
that software installations may require a well-known way to mount installation
media. It is recommended that during installation of a system the actual
hardware available is detected, and that the numbered versions of these
mountpoints are only used if there is more than one suitable device. If there
are sevveral suiatable devices, the unnumbered one should map into one of
the numbered ones.
It is further suggested that for newer Linux systems the automounter is used
to perform the actual mount. In that case, attention should be given to the
unmount time-out, and installation and administration frontends may want to
ensure that these can be unmounted by a user, in particular if they were
automatically mounted.
We are aware that this can only be an interim measure, insofar as these
mountpoints would have to be public, and would need further software to
afford users some amount of data privacy. It should be noted that if these
mountpoints are indeed public, then any user can change directory to them,
and thus block unmounting of the media.
End Rationale
======
N.B. personally I use /mpt rather than misc, but misc seems to be well
established, and I fear RedHat needs to swallow that /mnt/cdrom and friends
was a bad idea. Regarding autofs, I have set up my laptop to mount the CD-Rom
and CD-R on my desktop via nfs, i.e. the laptop automounts a filesystem
via NFS, the desktop in turn automounts the CD-ROM. It definitely works on
Linux, although I have very short time-outs (10 secoonds or so).
Solaris has trouble with stale file handles, i.e. when the nfs-client
Solaris systems is prevented from auto-unmounting, but the nfs-server
Linux system unmounts the CD-Rom. NFS-server Solaris systems never unmount
the CD-Rom while it is "shared", i.e. exported. Thus users can insert a
CD, vold mounts it, the user can then mount or automount it from elswhere
if the mountpoint is exported, and then get hold of a system manager to kill
the vold or unshare the mountpoint before the system lets go.
I also have no pesky users (other than myself) to block the umounting by
doing a cd to the removable. In fact, I have gotten into the habit of using
full pathnames and command recall rather than cd for removables. Once other
users come onto the system, bets are off, of course.
Note also that doing a stat() call (i.e. test -d /misc/cd) will actually
trigger an automount, if this is to be avoided, people will have to
resort to something like:
line=`ls -l /misc | grep /misc/cd`
case "$line" in
d*) echo /misc/cd is a directory;;
c*) ...;;
b*) ...;;
-*) ...;;
'') echo /misc/cd is not yet available;;
esac
Thomas
* Why not use metric units and get it right first time, every time ?
*
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