2014-05-06

How do I handle fstab mounts under run in Debian Wheezy?

A release goal for Debian 7.0 ("wheezy") was to introduce a new top level directory, /run, and relocate system state information that does not need to persist through a reboot but that may need to be written early or otherwise when the root filesystem is read only. Other distributions are also introducing /run and a proposal has been submitted to include it in the Filesystem Hiearchy Standard (FHS).

This is all fine and well, but it has tripped up automated mounting of /etc/fstab entries under /run (formerly /var/run).

The proposed update to debian-policy says this:
Files and directories residing in '/run' should be stored on a temporary filesystem and not be persistent across a reboot, and hence the presence of files or directories in any of these directories is not guaranteed and 'init.d' scripts must handle this correctly. This will typically amount to creating any required subdirectories dynamically when the 'init.d' script is run, rather than including them in the package and relying on 'dpkg' to create them.
Can I then conclude that /etc/init.d/mountall.sh is not handling /etc/fstab correctly with regard to mounts under /run or that there should be another init.d script to handle the /etc/fstab mounts under /run correctly or did the writers expect that fstab mounts under /run are invalid and all actions under it should be done programmatically by the individual services and generally be fixed-up by their init.d scripts?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

+Roger Leigh suggested adding a mkdir call in mountall.sh. This does the trick, but I'd prefer not to modify an init script.