Home / server / Questions / 815462
In Process
silent
Asked: 2016-11-18 00:44:48 +0800 CST

RHEL - Force mount order in fstab

  • 772

I have one network share that I mount in fstab. This is working fine.

Then, I have a second mount which binds on the folder from the first mount. Something like this:

//my-cifs-share/foo /mnt/foo-share cifs _netdev,dir_mode=0777 0 0
/mnt/foo-share /my/binded/folder none bind

Now, my problem is that apparently the second mount is executed before the first mount. Hence, the folder /my/binded/folder will empty after boot. When I then log in and execute mount -a just once, it gets created all fine.

So, is there any way to enforce the order or to make one mount depended on another one?

Thanks a lot!

//edit: As discussed in the comments there seems to be no real save path. Hence I decided to go with this: Leave fstab as it is above. Use crontab to run mount -a every 5 minutes. Seems to be good enough for now.

redhat mount fstab rhel7

2 Answers

  1. from man mount:

       -F, --fork
          (Used  in  conjunction  with -a.)  Fork off a new incarnation of
          mount for each device.  This will do  the  mounts  on  different
          devices  or  different  NFS  servers  in parallel.  This has the
          advantage that it is faster; also NFS timeouts go  in  parallel.
          A  disadvantage  is that the mounts are done in undefined order.
          Thus, you cannot use this option if you want to mount both  /usr
          and /usr/spool.

    I think your distro uses this parameter as default on boot. Try to find and remove it. (I don't know redhat)

    • 2

  2. Avoid defining static bind mounts to directories that reside on filesystems that aren't "guaranteed" to exist. You're bound to run into multiple problems as time goes on, and this is only one example. Consider what happens when this CIFS mount inevitably drops during operation.

    In most situations, this kind of scenario is better suited to a symbolic link than a bind mount. Symlinks handle their target dropping gracefully by becoming a "broken" link until the target is restored. Is there some reason you can't use a symlink for this?

    • 1