filesystem mounting conventions

[Arluin]

I'm kind of a rogue sysadmin. I never 'apprenticed' under senior sysadmins and never really got inculcated into an existing syadmin culture. Consequently a lot of things I do as a sysadmin grate on other sysadmins.

For example, I always mount temporary nfs file systems to /mnt. And any permanent filesystem mounts usually go directly under /.
Unfortunately I've run into problems where other permanently mount (local) filesystems under /mnt and then when I do my temporary mount overlay their filesystems! Oops. Sorry.

So I'm looking for a consensus on what conventions others use for mounting filesystems. I'm probably opening up a can of worms but... (at least I hope it's not a can of whup-a**).

Thanks in advance for any input.

 

[bi]

On non-Solaris systems, I will generally use /mnt to mount a CD (I don't do it on Solaris because it mounts CDs automatically).

When I do NFS mounts (and other mounts), I try to make the mount point meaningful: If it's an NFS, the name of the system it is coming from, the purpose of the mount, or something like that. If you mount all your NFS mounts to /mnt, how will the average user know what it is for?

I would never put a permanent mount on /mnt for the same reason: the name is pretty meaningless.

I prefer names like /mydatabase/data, /mydatabase/index, /mydatabase/rbs, etc., and put the data in data, index in index, etc. That way, you don't have to wonder are the files for the index of mydatabase in /mnt or /u02 or /whoknowswhat.

In the end, everyone you work with (including your end-users, not just your fellow admins) will appreciate it if you commnicate what you are going to do and where you are going to mount something.

And check to see what is already mounted where before you overmount something! I don't think I've ever seen someone do that more than once -- they learned their lesson the first time!