Fstab accidentally altered

Tripsun · 03-26-2011, 09:02 PM

Hi,
my /etc/fstab was inadvertently altered and I had to recreate most of it from memory. I am able to boot into my system so this "works" but I do not believe it was identical to my prior version or if someone has any suggestions for improvements to the options. I am sure all of the partitions are correctly linked to the entry (I had a list of it from my install):

Code:

# 
# /etc/fstab: static file system information
#
# <file system>        <dir>         <type>    <options>          <dump> <pass>
devpts                 /dev/pts      devpts    defaults            0      0
shm                    /dev/shm      tmpfs     nodev,nosuid        0      0

/dev/sda6 /boot ext3 defaults,noatime 0 1
/dev/sda10 swap swap defaults,noatime 0 0
/dev/sda3 / ext3 defaults,noatime 0 1
/dev/sda7 /home ext3 defaults,noatime 0 1
/dev/sda8 /usr ext3 defaults,noatime 0 1
/dev/sda9 /tmp ext3 defaults,noatime 0 1
/dev/sda5 /var reiserfs defaults,noatime 0 1

Thank you a lot!

carltm · 03-26-2011, 09:07 PM

I would change the options in the swap partition to "sw".
Also, unless you have a good reason, I'd suggest removing
the "noatime" option.

My guess is that you don't use dump to backup your system,
so keeping 0 for the dump option shouldn't be a problem.

Are you able to see files and directories in all of your
filesystems? Also, does the output of "free" show that
your swap space is in use?

Tripsun · 03-26-2011, 09:23 PM

So you mean like this:

Code:

# 
# /etc/fstab: static file system information
#
# <file system>        <dir>         <type>    <options>          <dump> <pass>
devpts                 /dev/pts      devpts    defaults            0      0
shm                    /dev/shm      tmpfs     nodev,nosuid        0      0

/dev/sda6 /boot ext3 defaults 0 1
/dev/sda10 swap swap sw 0 0
/dev/sda3 / ext3 defaults 0 1
/dev/sda7 /home ext3 defaults 0 1
/dev/sda8 /usr ext3 defaults 0 1
/dev/sda9 /tmp ext3 defaults 0 1
/dev/sda5 /var reiserfs defaults 0 1

I added the noatime after reading a suggestion to do so somewhere (I did some brief research on noatime v relatime), but I am quite inexperienced with linux (and don't fully understand the implications).

Here is the output of #free:

Code:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       6085060     473792    5611268          0      11404     139992
-/+ buffers/cache:     322396    5762664
Swap:      3903756          0    3903756

carltm · 03-26-2011, 09:32 PM

Yes, what you have looks good. It shows that you have about 4 GB of
swap space.

Incidentally, the noatime option can speed up disk access slightly
at the cost of losing information about when a file was last accessed.
My rule of thumb is to go with the defaults unless you have a very
good reason to change it.

Tripsun · 03-27-2011, 02:37 PM

Well I have looked at a few places and it seems that noatime is advisable for laptops. Here is an updated version after a bit of searching, how does it look:

Code:

# 
# /etc/fstab: static file system information
#
# <file system>        <dir>         <type>    <options>          <dump> <pass>
devpts                 /dev/pts      devpts    defaults            0      0
shm                    /dev/shm      tmpfs     nodev,nosuid        0      0

/dev/sda5 /boot ext3 defaults,noatime 0 2 
/dev/sda10 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/sda3 / ext3 defaults,noatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/sda8 /home ext3 defaults,noatime,nosuid,nodev,errors=remount-ro 0 2
/dev/sda9 /usr ext3 defaults,noatime,nodev,errors=remount-ro 0 2
/dev/sda7 /tmp ext3 defaults,noatime,nodev,nosuid,noexec 0 2
/dev/sda6 /var reiserfs defaults,noatime,nodev,nosuid,noexec,barrier=flush 0 2