I am tasked with managing a complex structure of Linux (CentOS 8) VMs and hardware, hosting among other things various SMB and NFS exports. Most of them are simultaneously servers and clients, of one protocol or both.
Ideally of course I'd want all filesystems to be included in /etc/fstab
on each machine, so everything comes up automatically. The catch is I do not have any physical access to the hardware or console access to the VMs, only SSH access to everything. And, to the best of my understanding, under the default options, if one of the mounts is unavailable at boot the system will hang indefinitely. Therefore if, say, two of the machines go down but only one comes up, and some of the mounts become inaccessible (or if I just make a mistake in one of the fstab
s) everything might end up unbootable with no straightforward way of fixing it.
What's the best way to set this up? A soft
mount would be one option, but my reading suggests it risks silent data corruption, which I absolutely cannot risk given the nature of the workload. I've considered nofail
, but I'm getting a bit confused by the definition from the man page:
nofail
Do not report errors for this device if it does not exist.
Clearly I do want some kind of error to be reported, but I do want the machine to boot so I can fix it.
Any ideas? Thanks very much in advance.