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

2015-04-18 Thread walt
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?





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

2015-04-18 Thread 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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