Working with the Filesystem Table

$ cat /etc/fstab

LABEL=/                 /                       ext3    defaults        1 1
LABEL=/boot             /boot                   ext3    defaults        1 2
none                    /dev/pts                devpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
none                    /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults        0 0
none                    /proc                   proc    defaults        0 0
none                    /sys                    sysfs   defaults        0 0
/dev/hdf2               swap                    swap    defaults        0 0
/dev/cdrom              /mnt/cdrom              udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/cdrom1             /mnt/cdrom1             udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/hdc4               /mnt/zip                auto    noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0
/dev/fd0                /mnt/floppy             auto    noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0

Each line in the fstab file consists of six fields separated by spaces or tabs. 

The contents of the fields are described in Table 3.2, as follows:

Table 3.2: fstab file fields

The /etc/fstab file can be modified to change what devices will be mounted where or, in our case, to make a new device mount at boot.  Using a text editor (like vi which covered in chapter 5) we can carefully add the following line to the /etc/fstab file to make new1 mount at boot:

/dev/hdb1         /new1       ext3  defaults    1 1

While the management of hard disk volumes is an advanced topic and will not be presented in detail in this guide, the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) subsystem provided in Linux for Systems Administrators is worthy of mention.  It can be used to create and manage disk volume groups from physical disk volumes.  By allowing physically separate disks to be combined into a single logical disk, LVM simplifies many aspects of disk management.  When working from a simple Linux workstation with one or two internal disk drives, there will likely be no need to use LVM; however when administrating Linux servers that have arrays of disks attached LVM can be invaluable.

The user must have root access in order to use the LVM subsystem. LVM is a parameter driven subsystem controlled by specifications found in the text file located at /etc/lvm/lvm.conf.  The configuration file contains several comments which describe each section.  The LVM subsystem has over 40 commands for the creation and management of volume groups.  Though this book does not cover LVM, table 3.3 below contains a partial list of available LVM subcommands to give you a taste of what LVM is capable of:

Table 3.3: LVM subcommands and their functions