Chapter 13 Setting up Quotas

cutteranalysis

So on Chapter 13.3b I modified my /etc/fstab entry to..

/dev /sbd1 /home /etx4 defaults,ursquota 1, 1

and then did

sudo mount -0 remount /home

(rest of the commands.. were cmd not found.. )

anyhow,. when I try to go back into the /etc/fstab entry it claims its being edited by root, and either gives me a blank file in nano, or an infinite loop of "y"'s (which is the beigning of me typeing

yes, I want to edit this file.

So.. what gives?

What do I need to do re-edit the file? clear the cache? the History?

It really shouldn't misbehave like this in the first place. And then there's this cmd not found.. I want to move on in the chapter of course.

Thanks guys,

Jeff

luisviveropena

Hi Jeff,

1) What distro and version are you using?

2) What's the missing command name?

3) Are you editing the file using sudo, root or any other user?

Thanks,
Luis.

saqman2060

cutteranalysis wrote:

So on Chapter 13.3b I modified my /etc/fstab entry to..

/dev /sbd1 /home /etx4 defaults,ursquota 1, 1


and then did

sudo mount -0 remount /home
(rest of the commands.. were cmd not found.. )

anyhow,. when I try to go back into the /etc/fstab entry it claims its being edited by root, and either gives me a blank file in nano, or an infinite loop of "y"'s (which is the beigning of me typeing
yes, I want to edit this file.

So.. what gives?

What do I need to do re-edit the file? clear the cache? the History?
It really shouldn't misbehave like this in the first place. And then there's this cmd not found.. I want to move on in the chapter of course.

Thanks guys,

Jeff

I noticed you are mounting a partition into the /home directory. Unless that partition was setup during installation, you won't be able to login. The only way you can is by logging in as root which is what you might be experiencing. Just a theory.

If you can, tell us exactly what the exercise is asking and perhaps we can better assess the issue.

coop

Also please note it should be
mount -o ...
not
mount -O ....

and if the edit thing is it being open in a nother process you either have to reboot or get rid of a lock file depending on the editor, but another editor would not care.

saqman2060

coop wrote:

Also please note it should be
mount -o ...
not
mount -O ....

and if the edit thing is it being open in a nother process you either have to reboot or get rid of a lock file depending on the editor, but another editor would not care.

Jerry you can mount a filesystem in the home directory after installation? This method would not remove user accounts residing on the partition?

coop

You certainly can mount something over /home (by the way he has /ext4 in his post not ext4, but maybe that is a typo as well...)

Mounting something over /home is routine (or was) on Solaris and other operating systems which grew up in multi-user network environments and was actually default in many cases. /home would often be on a network (NFS) shared server. Many advantages to doing this. Linux certainly supports this. You just have to make sure that the mount is done before user accounts start, which is normal; all /etc/fstab entries are processed before any user accounts can be used. However, if you try to mount something on /home after the system starts, it is going to be a disaster.

saqman2060

Thinks Jerry. You cleared up some confusion. If you were to mount a filesystem in the /home directory after Linux fully boots, you will loose your user accounts. This was what I thought was being done.

However mounting one in root during system boot is OK. So then what is the correct way to mount a filesystem within a file system?

coop

Just watch the order. As far as I know, /etc/fstab is done sequentially. So, for example, you would have mount in the order

/home
/home/staff

or

/usr
/usr/share

etc.

I do this sort of thing all the time, though usually with loopback mounts or bind mounts, e.g.:

/VIRTUAL2/KERNELS.sqfs /usr/src/KERNELS squashfs loop 0 0

this can only be done *after* /VIRTUAL2 and /usr/src are mounted obviously, then a new filesystem is mounted on /usr/src/KERNELS

(if it were a mount command it would be

sudo mount -o loop /VIRTUAL2/KERNELS.sqfs /usr/src/KERNELS

)

saqman2060

This just got interesting. As the system boots, it runs through a series of actions that must be completed in the order it was set it. If /etc/fstab is read before user accounts are loaded, then those mounts are established, then whenever should go in them is mounted.

I know you can setup /home to be on a separate partition during installation. Now, we can have linux mount a partition created after installation to any location under the "/" directory.

This is how I am seeing this play out,

During installation, /home is setup and mounted on a filesystem. Then user accounts comes after. System boots, /home is mounted and user accounts are place in it. After installation, I create a new filesystem, one bigger and better than the original. I set this new filesystem to mount within the /home directory which resides on another filesystem. The system boots, it reads /etc/fstab and sees the procedure to mount /home first, then the newly created filesystem is mounted inside /home and then user accounts are placed in it. The file system that is mounted links to some storage elsewhere. That storage gets filled first.

Do both filesystems must be identical in size?

coop

no

saqman2060

Did my description make sense?

luisviveropena

Hi,

The filesystems don't need to be of the same size. In fact you may want to move /home to another directory because you need one bigger.

Regards,

Luis.