The mountlate rc.d boot script cannot be disabled

[Devin Teske]

First, let me prefix my inline responses with stating that:

Due to the addition of the "failok" mount(8) option, it is highly likely that this may solve our problems.

However, since the "failok" addition is currently not available in any -RELEASE, we cannot test it for production deployment (maybe in 6-months).

With that being said, we look forward to when FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE will be made available (as I've confirmed that "failok" is tagged for RELENG_8, the source for what should be 8.3 when created).


On Dec 31, 2011, at 3:21 PM, Doug Barton wrote:

> On 12/31/2011 8:34 AM, Chris Rees wrote:
>> Doug, is there a reason that the patch is harmful?
> 
> 1. An unlimited number of knobs is not a virtue, it just leads to more
> user confusion.
> 
> 2. The harm caused by a user accidentally flipping this is much greater
> than any possible benefit that it could provide.

I've been thinking about it and the patch does have the following two negatives:

1. disabling mountlate means the administrator needs to memorize that whilst looking at fstab(5) that "late" filesystems could be neutered (good or bad, requires modification of man-pages, re-training to learn new axioms, etc.)

2. mountlate is metaphorically the "enforcer" of mountcritremote. Disabling mountlate means mountcritremote doesn't really make remote mounts critical.

So, up until this point, we'd not been aware of the new "failok" option (why would we? it's not really available yet) and now that we know about it, we look forward to checking it out in a future release. But at this time, neither 8.1 nor 8.2 support it. Until we can upgrade, we'll have to resort to modifying the system in some way.


> I think Jilles had a good point, it's likely that the best actual change
> to be made here is better documentation of the failok knob for fstab.
> 

Gcooper raised docs/163742 to address the lacking documentation.
-- 
Devin

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