FreeBSD 7 trivial problems / notes

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2007-12-10 23:54, Ollivier Robert <roberto at keltia.freenix.fr> wrote:
>According to Ivan Voras:
>> And this gives it the right to block system from booting? I'd at
>> least like a symlink from "true" to "fsck_tmpfs".
>
> It is in the are of « it hurts when I do this. Then don't do that! ».
>
> Like someone else said, "0" should be used on special fs (like nfs).

I was the one.  After a couple of email exchanges with Ivan, I
also proposed something like the following, to see if he likes it
better than stopping the boot process on mount failures:

% Here's the source ofmy confusion, then.  I don't really
% understand why setting the sixth field to zero is something you
% don't like.  It's explicitly described in the fstab manpage as
% the way to disable fsck on the particular filesystem:
%
%     The sixth field, (fs_passno), is used by the fsck(8) and
%     quotacheck(8) programs to determine the order in which file
%     system checks are done at reboot time.  [...] If the sixth
%     field is not present or is zero, a value of zero is
%     returned and fsck(8) and quotacheck(8) will assume that the
%     file system does not need to be checked.
%
% The suggestion to make it non-fatal sounds nice though.  Maybe
% we should consider an `rc.conf' option which controls if mount
% failures are actually considered fatal or just `annoying', and
% then make the failure conditional on that option, i.e.:
%
%     mount_failure_level={IGNORE,WARN,FATAL}
%
% Adding a mount(8) option, which can be set per filesystem is
% probably also a good idea, i.e. something like:
%
%     /dev/acd0  /cdrom  cd9660  ro,auto,mounterror=ignore 0 0
%
% It's too late to introduce something like this to 7.0, but if
% it works and is accepted as an idea, we can implement it on
% HEAD and backport it later :-)

I still don't see why user-error in fstab for tmpfs should be
treated as a special case, but that's probably me being blinded
by a few years of "UNIX can let you shoot your foot, but it's not
the fault of UNIX if you do, in fact, blast it off".

- Giorgos