• interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    A typo in fstab shouldn’t wreck the system. Why is that not resilient ? I added an extra mount point to an empty partition but forgot to actually create it in LVM.

    During boot, device not found and boot halted, on a computer with no monitor/keyboard

    • BaumGeist@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      It will cause a critical error during boot if the device isn’t given the nofail mount option, which is not included in the defaults option, and then fails to mount. For more details, look in the fstab(5) man page, and for even more detail, the mount(8) man page.

      Found that out for myself when not having my external harddrive enclosure turned on with a formatted drive in it caused the pc to boot into recovery mode (it was not the primary drive). I had just copy-pasted the options from my root partition, thinking I could take the shortcut instead of reading documentation.

      There’s probably other ways that a borked fstab can cause a fail to boot, but that’s just the one I know of from experience.

        • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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          1 month ago

          Its a ‘failsafe’ , like if part of the system depends on that drive mounting then if it fails then don’t continue. Not the expected default, but probably made sense at some point. Like if brakes are broken don’t allow starting truck, type failsafe.

          • wormer@lemmy.ml
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            1 month ago

            Yea like the default is smart? How is it supposed to know if that’s critical or not at that point? The alternative is for it to silently fail and wait for something else to break instead of failing gracefully? I feel like I’m growing more and more petty and matching the language of systemd haters but like just think about it for a few minutes???

            • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
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              1 month ago

              the default is smart

              Looking at the systems that are supported, it makes the greatest sense to have the safest failure mode as default. If fault tolerance is available, that can be handled in the entry but, it makes sense but to assume. Having that capability built into the default adds more complexity and reduces support for systems that are not tolerant of a missing mount.

            • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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              1 month ago

              The system failed for no good reason, failing is exactly what it should never ever do. If it had just continued, everything would have been fine.

            • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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              1 month ago

              Edit: just saw your other comment, so this may not apply to you now…Not that the default is smart, but the default has been set to fail a boot if parts are missing. Imagine a rocket launch system check, is temperature system online, no, fail and abort. While as users – for convenience–we want the system to boot even though a drive went offline, that may not be best default for induatrial applications. Or where another system relylies on first one to be up and coherent. So we have to use the nofail option, to contine the boot on missing drive.