[SOLVED] Preventing nonexistent filesystem in fstab from blocking boot

Question

Some years ago I moved out of my parents house, but that didn't exonerate me from being their netadmin. I have an arch box there which provides local fileserver, DHCP, and NAT. It's set up with a RAID5+LVM samba server to give my parents an easy place to back up their local computers and dump photographs.
At one point while I was clear on the other side of the world from them, one of the drives in the RAID5 failed. No problem - the data's safe. But the bigger issue was that it prevented the system from booting. There are entries in fstab to mount filesystems, and when one doesn't exist the whole thing just hangs. Usually when problems occur I just ssh in from wherever I am and fix whatever is wrong. In this case, I had to walk my father through using single user mode and editing fstab with vim over the phone. It sucked.
Is there an elegant way to ensure that when a non-critical filesystem listed in fstab disappears that it does not prevent the system from booting? So far my kludge solution has been to remove the entry from fstab and just mount it manually from rc.local. But that seems like a hack. Is there a better solution?
Thanks,
Sasha
Last edited by kleptophobiac (2011-01-02 04:26:41)

Answer 1

Try using the option 'nofail'.  For example, in fstab:
UUID=669b1bcd-5ae9-4ae9-868c-be327b044e23 /mnt/backup jfs defaults,nofail,noatime,nodiratime,noexec,nosuid 0 2