Re: [gentoo-user] Strange new behavior from the "mount" command

[Paul Colquhoun]

On Sat, 18 Apr 2015 11:48:12 walt wrote:
> I have two similar but not identical ~amd64 machines, and *one* of the
> two machines is doing something new and strange when I type "mount"
with
> no arguments.
>
> The "bad" machine prints the list of mounted filesystems as it should,
> but then proceeds to read the partition table on every disk in the
machine
> and writes a fresh version of /run/blkid/blkid.tab .
>
> This has the very annoying side effect of spinning up any sleeping disks,
> including the floppy disk (but not the dvd player, thankfully).
>
> I re-installed util-linux, which installs the "mount" utility, but no
> difference.  (The two machines both have util-linux-2.26.1-r1).
>
> This new behavior began on April 14, FWIW, and the only package I
installed
> on that machine that day was gentoo-sources-3.14.38, which is why I
blamed
> the new kernel for the new behavior but I discovered since then that it
> happens with all the old kernels too.
>
> I'm stumped.  Any ideas?


Are you sure they are both running the same mount command?

What does 'type mount' or 'which mount' show for each machine?

Is the 'bad' machine perhaps using the '-l' option, which looks like it may 
need to read information from partitions on the fly:

-l, --show-labels
    Add the labels in the mount output.  mount must have permission to 
read
    the disk device (e.g. be suid root) for this to work.  One can set such
    a label for ext2, ext3 or ext4 using the e2label(8) utility, or for XFS
    using xfs_admin(8), or for reiserfs using reiserfstune(8).

On the other hand, using '-l' on my machine didn't appear to try anything, 
and didn't rewrite /run/blkid/blkid.tab but that may be because I don't use 
labels.


-- 
Reverend Paul Colquhoun, ULC.     http://andor.dropbear.id.au/
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