From: mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere   
      
   Jim Diamond  writes:   
      
   > I admire your ability to find weird things.  :-)   
      
   I'll be 81 in less than a fortnight so I'm just happy that the wetware   
   can still do that.  But I *would* much rather be *using* my new setup   
   than groveling through stuff I really shouldn't need to know.   
      
   > On 2023-02-16 at 20:34 AST, Mike Spencer  wrote:   
   >   
   >> Brain damage due to the morass of fulminating complexity.   
   >>   
   >> In 14.2 and before, mounts were recorded in /etc/mtab.  In that file,   
   >> a user-mounted f/s was tagged with the uname of the user who mounted   
   >> it.   
   >>   
   >> Bogus is a 14.2 system:   
   >>   
   >>    bogus% mount /mnt/enoch   
   >>    bogus% grep enoch /etc/mtab   
   >>   
   >>       enoch:/ /mnt/enoch nfs rw,user=mds,hard,intr,addr=192.168.0.22 0 0   
   >>   
   >> But in 15, /etc/mtab is a symlink to /proc/mounts   
   >   
   > Not on my Slackware64 15.0 system:   
   >   
   > % ls -l /etc/mtab   
   > -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 523 Feb 18 15:57 /etc/mtab   
      
   Now that's really bizarre.  A very basic difference between 32 and 64   
   bit Slackware?   
      
   > While I don't currently use NFS, there are a couple of lines in my   
   > /etc/mtab with user=.   
      
   Yeah, like these from my 14.2 main box:   
      
      /dev/sda4 /mnt/sda4 ext4 rw,nosuid,nodev,user=mds 0 0   
      enoch:/ /mnt/enoch nfs rw,user=mds,hard,intr,addr=192.168.0.22 0 0   
      
   A HD partition and a host on the LAN, both mounted by mds, allowed by   
   "user" in /etc/fstab.   
      
   > Are you by any chance using some desktop environment which has decided   
   > it knows better than you, and has done some strange things?   
      
   Gak!  No.  I use twm, possibly the least intrusive window manager   
   available.  Didn't even install the KDE stuff.   
      
   > If you do a clean reboot, before attempting to mount anything, is   
   > /etc/mtab a symlink or a real file?   
      
   Symlink.  ls -l /etc/mtab first command after reboot.   
      
   > And if it is a symlink, I wonder if booting from a USB stick, mounting   
   > the / partition, deleting the symlink, and rebooting would show   
   > anything.   
      
   It might.  I don't understand why, though.   
      
   That feels too like a rabbit hole for me.  I always have an   
   iconified window down in the corner su'd to root.  Rot can umount NFS   
   mounts easily enough, just a bother [1] and an annoyance that something   
   documented to work, doesn't.   
      
   [1] People my age are thought to be afflicted with an encroaching fear   
       of death.  The real bummer is more unsought-for bother. :-)   
      
      
   --   
   Mike Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)