ext3 modes

Be careful with relying onbin-mount to figure out the exact state of mounted filesystems.

mount, when executed without arguments, reads theetc-mtab to get the info. However,etc-mtab doesn't always reflect the true state of the mounted filesystems. Just a couple of days we had to install a hand compiled kernel on one of our Debian machines.

The box has a sata (shows up as scsi) disk, and four disks hanging off four 3ware ide raid controllers. With the original Debian kernel (modularized), the sata controller was found first, and the disk on it wasdev-sda. However, when booting with our own kernel (2.6.14), the very same controller was found last, and the disk becamedev-sde. This disk has the root filesystem. Whichever kernel we boot, mount says that the root filesystem is ondev-sda. This happens because it readsetc-mtab, which doesn't get updated when root is unmounted just before shutdown. When it gets mounted right at startup, has the old info.

Finally, I had to deleteetc-mtab, and reboot the box so I can rely onetc-mtab.

Instead, checkproc-mounts, if you can. This issue (-etc-mtab can be not up to date) is discussed in mount's manpage.

Vilmos