Re: Most directories locked read-only: unlocked!

On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 10:04:17PM -0500, Ken Heard wrote:
>
> I then was able to amend /etc/fstab for the root directory mount by
> fixing the typo. I also removed the "errors=remount-ro" option.
> Apparently the Debian installer always adds this option to the fstab
> mount line for the root directory, and no one on the list could
> enlighten me as to what purpose it serves by being there,

The idea simply is to prevent greater damage, in case a filesystem
should start to develop minor inconsistencies, due to hardware slowly
beginning to fail, or whatever. In that case, you'd be glad to have
some mechanism in place that immediately stops further write accesses,
if any such problem is detected -- as mildly broken filesystems tend to
get corrupted exponentially, if you just keep writing to them...

It probably simply hasn't occurred to the developers that, by treating
all types of mount errors the same way, poor admins might get into the
somewhat unfortunate situation of locking themselves out, if they
accidentally put a wrong option into fstab -- as you have witnessed...

I think it would indeed make sense to keep such mere syntax errors from
resulting in a read-only mount. Maybe you want to file a wishlist bug.

Almut


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