[lug] /etc/fstab in the modern world

[Elyse M. Grasso]

I'm using KRUD FC2 on a dual boot system.

Can someone point me to some recent documentation on handling the multiple 
types of modern removable drives in /etc/fstab?

My current /etc/fstab looks like:
LABEL=/                 /                       ext3    defaults        1 1
LABEL=/boot             /boot                   ext3    defaults        1 2
none                    /dev/pts                devpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
LABEL=/home             /home                   ext3    defaults        1 2
none                    /proc                   proc    defaults        0 0
none                    /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults        0 0
LABEL=/tmp              /tmp                    ext3    defaults        1 2
LABEL=/var              /var                    ext3    defaults        1 2
/dev/hda7               swap                    swap    defaults        0 0
/dev/hda1               /mnt/Windows            ntfs    auto,ro,umask=0222     
0 0
/dev/sda1             /mnt/extWin             vfat    noauto,user     0 0
/dev/sda2             /mnt/ext                ext3    noauto,user     0 0
/dev/sda3             /mnt/ext3               ext3    noauto,user     0 0
/dev/sda4             /mnt/ext4               ext3    noauto,user     0 0

/dev/cdrom              /mnt/cdrom              udf,iso9660 
noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/hde1               /mnt/chip       vfat    noauto,user 0 0

I find RedHat's use of labels instead on devices in /etc/fstab annoying, since 
it hides potentially useful information. Is there any reason NOT to switch 
the LABEL entries back to /dev/hda? entries?

/dev/sda1 is either the first partition on my USB external drive that I use 
for backups, or my thumb drive. It was pure luck that the fstab entry for 
extWin turned out to be appropriate for the thumb drive, and I've never tried 
using the thumb and external drives at the same time: I assume to be safe I 
would need to bring up the external drive first, so its 4 partitions will map 
where I expect them, then load the thumb drive, figure out what device it is, 
and add an fstab entry and mount point for it...

I forget what happens when I connect my camera over the USB cable (I usually 
use the PCMCIA chip-carrier at /dev/hde1 -- habit from an earlier version of 
the software that didn't support my camera model) but I could have the 
camera, thumb-drive and external drive all attached at the same time, since 
my laptop has 3 USB connectors. How is one supposed to set up mount points to 
deal with this situation? Does it help to be consistent about which device 
gets plugged into which USB socket?

Is it legal to have both 
/dev/sda1             /mnt/extWin             vfat    noauto,user     0 0
and 
/dev/sda1             /mnt/thumb             vfat    noauto,user     0 0
in an fstab and just mount the appropriate one?
Another carry-over from 2.4 kernels is the -ro setting on the NTFS mount. Has 
anyone heard whether rw is considered safe now?

Are there modern tools for handling ephemeral drive mounts? I generally 
dislike the RedHat config tools: they never seem to do a complete job and 
like to break manual settings that do work....

And is there any way to stop the error  messages I get during boot because 
modprobe tries to load the modules for the non-existent floppy drive? RedHat 
8 and 9 didn't do that, but Fedora startup seems stupid about it, and they 
don't seem to fix it.
-- 
Elyse Grasso

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