[TriLUG] Problems with /etc/mtab

[Jeremy Katz]

On Sun, 2003-01-26 at 18:08, Corey Mutter wrote:
> > I was wondering what would cause /etc/mtab to report that one device
> > (floppy) is mounted twice?  This has happened on one of our systems and
> > I was just wondering what on earth caused this.  Could this be caused by
> > trying to mount and bad floppy?
> > 
> > Thsi is part of the file in question
> > 
> > /dev/fd0 /floppy vfat rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,user=userid1 0 0
> > /dev/fd0 /floppy vfat rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,user=userid2 0 0
> 
> I recently went through building a Linux From Scratch system 
> (www.linuxfromscratch.org), and they recommend making /etc/mtab a
> symbolic link to /proc/mounts, to avoid this very type of problem
> (stale info hanging around in /etc/mtab).

The downside to doing this is that there is a significant amount of
information preserved in /etc/mtab usually that doesn't exist in
/proc/mounts (things like options when mounting the filesystem, better
information on what is loopback mounted, some useful stuff for nfs
mounts, etc).  Very useful when trying to remount a fs or wanting to
know exactly how something was mounted.

Cheers,

Jeremy