Ahoy, some of us had the problem that the "mount -a" in /etc/rc printed "warning: couldn't open /etc/mtab: ..." and that afterwards there were lots of root-fs entries in /etc/mtab. I looked into the problem and found that it is a bug in util-linux-ng 2.14.1, in the mount command. I sent a patch to the util-linux-ng mailing list, but I don't know how long it will take until the patch is in upstream and upstream is updated in the CRUX ports, so I just forward the patch to this list. Feel free to patch your own util-linux-ng ;) However, the warning doesn't go away, since /etc/mtab really isn't there (it's deleted in /etc/rc for some reason), but /etc/mtab isn't that messy anymore. Regards, Jonas Kramer ----- Forwarded message from Jonas Kramer <jkramer@nex.scrapping.cc> ----- Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 22:36:18 +0200 From: Jonas Kramer <jkramer@nex.scrapping.cc> Subject: [PATCH] mount: mtab created multiple times with -a option To: kzak@redhat.com User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.18 (2008-05-17) Ahoy. Since util-linux-ng 2.14.1, the following problem occurs with mount. When /etc/mtab does not exist and mount is called with -a, for every mount point that is mounted a root-fs record is added to mtab. This is because get_mtab_info() sets the flag mtab_does_not_exist to 1 when it doesn't find /etc/mtab. However, if it actually finds /etc/mtab, the variable is not reset to 0. So on every subsequent call to get_mtab_info() (as it is the case when mounting several mount points with the -a option), mount will think that /etc/mtab does not exist, even if it was created in the meantime by mount itself. Additionally, create_mtab() does open /etc/mtab with "a+" even though it is only called when mount thinks that /etc/mtab does not exist. So for every mount point that is mounted with -a, another root-fs entry is added to /etc/mtab. The attached patch seems to fix that. Regards, Jonas Kramer -- diff --git a/mount/fstab.c b/mount/fstab.c index 895fd2c..eb38822 100644 --- a/mount/fstab.c +++ b/mount/fstab.c @@ -30,13 +30,20 @@ static int var_mtab_is_a_symlink = 0; static void get_mtab_info(void) { - struct stat mtab_stat; - if (!have_mtab_info) { + struct stat mtab_stat; + if (lstat(_PATH_MOUNTED, &mtab_stat)) var_mtab_does_not_exist = 1; - else if (S_ISLNK(mtab_stat.st_mode)) - var_mtab_is_a_symlink = 1; + else { + var_mtab_does_not_exist = 0; + + if (S_ISLNK(mtab_stat.st_mode)) + var_mtab_is_a_symlink = 1; + else + var_mtab_is_a_symlink = 0; + } + have_mtab_info = 1; } } ----- End forwarded message ----- --