In the interests of clarity, I shall refer to the two computers herein as Tux
and Dozy (their names).
Over the weekend I edited the /etc/fstab file on both computers. I added a
second hard drive to the /etc/fstab on Tux, with a view to using cron and
rsync to back up for me. The only point of this example is that it worked,
without a hitch, and has continued to work. (I.e. 2 hard drives are mounted
when the systme boots up.) So I must have been doing the right thing in this
case at least.
Dozy was a different story. It is quite a long saga and I don't know how much
detail you need. So I'll give a summary and perhaps you would be kind enough
to ask questions if I have given you the wrong bit or not enough info.
The aim: mount one of 2 DVD ROM drives at boot up.
*I duly edited /etc/fstab, changing the following line
/dev/cdrom1 /media/cdrom udf,iso9660 defaults,user,noauto,ro 0
0
to
/dev/cdrom1 /media/cdrom udf,iso9660 defaults,users,auto,ro 0
0
I thne rebooted and all was well - the DVD ROM drive was mounted at boot up.
I rebooted again - and the DVD ROM drive was unmounted and the fstab back to
what it had been in the first place.*
Repeat from *to* until thoroughly fed up (in my case some 6 or 7 times).
I decided that it must be using something somewhere on the computer that
contained the original file. Perhaps it was using the back-up I had created
of fstab before messing around with it. So I duly edited the back-up file,
the back-up of the backup file (created by the computer) the backup of fstab
created by the computer, and rebooted.
Again, fine the first time, a failure the second. So I delved. fstab was
back to its original form, and another backup file created by the computer in
the original form. So, I edited both files that now held
"...user,noauto,ro...". Again, fine the first time I booted up, back to
square 1 the second. So I tried deleting the references to any kind of user
or any kind of anything other than defaults in all the files. Same result.
By now I have got fstab, fstab~, fstab~~, fstab~~~, fstab~~~~, fstab~~~~~ and
fstab~~~~~~.
So I changed tack. I deleted all the files, including my own back-up, except
fstab itself, which I reedited.
That appeared to have worked. It survived 4 or 5 reboots - but has now gone
back to what it was in the first place.
I am at a total loss. Both systems are running the same distro (Libranet 3
updated and upgraded with Sarge). I had no trouble on Tux. Why is Dozy
being so troublesome? And what do I do to solve the problem?
TIA
Lisi
