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Santosa Sandy
Asked: 2014-01-26 05:35:11 +0800 CST

The effect of putting sudo -i command in /etc/fstab

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I have a computer (computer A) which only can be accessed by ssh from another computer (computer B) within internal network.

ssh username@10.**.**.**

FYI, I do not activate root account in computer A.

Later on, when I already login to the computer A, I modify the /etc/fstab file by adding sudo -i as additional line in it.

Finally, I reboot the computer A. Several minutes later, I try to login to computer A again but I can not.

Is it related to my modification or there is internal network down at the moment? Thanks

ssh

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You don't put commands in the fstab. That file is just a list of mounts which should be automounted (or not). The mountall command runs as root when you boot, and mounts everything which is listed in the fstab. (Except those mounts which have the noauto options set in fstab, those ones are not automounted.) So you don't have to care about sudo.

    If you put sudo -i into fstab then the mountall command likely can't parse that file because of that syntax error: The mountall command is trying to mount the sudo -i drive or something more wrong. So yes, this is your problem.

    You rebooted your computer with a syntax error in fstab. As the system boots, it calls mountall to mount the listed things from fstab. mountall reaches that sudo -i line which he doesn't know what to do with. Your system is likely stuck at this point and waiting for interaction on what to do.

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