[PLUG] Search entire filesystem except two mounted partitions

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sun, 1 Dec 2019 15:36:47 -0500
Tomas Kuchta <tomas.kuchta.lists at gmail.com> dijo:

>How do you know that mount does not follow fstab order?

If it did /dev/sda1 would be / and /dev/sda2 would be /home. Instead
they are sdc1 and sdc2.

>Everything works fine, you do not seem to have order dependencies in
>fstab. So, how could you tell and why would it matter?

It does not matter right now, but if the drive assignations change at
random then what will happen sometime in the future when I want to do
something with a drive? Perhaps it is because I am old, but I want
things to stay the way they are. The sudden change when I rebooted
after the dist-upgrade where /home had been /dev/sdb2 since 2013 and
suddenly was /dev/sdc1 caused grief. I had defined it in fstab
as /dev/sdb2, and the boot process couldn't find it. I have since
defined it in fstab as LABEL=Home, but I want to understand why systemd
suddenly changed its drive letter. I also want to understand why /
and /home are now on /dev/sdc, presumably the last partitions to be
mounted. Wouldn't / need to be mounted first? If / is not mounted then
the mount points for the other partitions don't exist yet.

>Lines in syslog are probably written when mount finishes/fails. Systemd
>starts fstab lines in order, but asynchronously, so the end mount
>messages maybe out of order.
>
>I do not see any mount related connection to grub nor j2db. Grub
>happens long time before mount and j2db long time after successful
>mount.

JBD2 starts accessing home repeatedly right after boot finishes, even
before I launch any applications.

>Your jdb2 type of problems are kind of expected - given that you did
>not install the OS, many system install state assumptions might not be
>valid. Perhaps the jdb2 output is not written or something else keeps
>hopelessly changing files in your home, triggering jdb2 updates.

If something is continually changing files in /home it is not a program
that I launched. I have booted and just let the computer sit without
launching any applications, yet the drive light runs off and on
continuously, and iotop says it is JBD2 accessing /dev/sdc2.
And /dev/sdc2 is /home, the partition that caused initial boot failure
after the upgrade.

>Default install should not take more than hour-ish and it might give
>you some answers.

LOL. I have 246 .desktop files to launch applications that I have
installed. At least half of them are not in the repos, in spite of
eight active PPAs. I had to go though a lot of hassle to install each
one. And then there are all the configurations. It takes me about an
hour just to configure the Xfce desktop the way I want it. Try
installing a Polytonic Greek keyboard in your desktop and see how long
it takes you - and that's just one of dozens of configurations that I
have to set up, just for the desktop. Each application has dozens more
configurations. Bear in mind that just doing the installations and
configurations might take only a day; but I have to add the time spent
searching the net for how to do it.

The last time I did a fresh install it took me about eight days to get
to the point where 90% of my configurations were done and the computer
was fully usable for all the things I needed to do with it. The recent
dist-upgrade took only a couple hours or so for the installation, and
about three hours more to figure out that I couldn't boot because /home
was no longer /dev/sdb2, and to fix it. Of course, I still have the
grub and JBD2 issues, but I'm not spending a lot of time on them, and I
have to allocate at least half of the time I'm spending on them to
education.

A fresh install of any distro results in a computer that is pretty much
useless to me. I can't type letters with three or more diacritics on a
letter, I can't type more than a handful of IPA characters, I can't rip
and encode a Blu-ray movie, then extract the vobsub subtitles, then OCR
them to .srt subtitles, and then edit them. I can't even back up my 8TB
of data to my Synology because the rsync script will be gone and I
can't remember how I wrote it. In fact, I won't even be able to mount
the Synology because it took a long thread here to figure out the
syntax necessary for the line in fstab. Yeah, I could save some of that
stuff and then put it back, but then something won't work and it'll take
an hour searching the net to figure out how to fix it.

I might add that the first Linux on this computer was Xubuntu 13.10, a
fresh install of the latest version at the time. I knew it was going to
take me a very long time to configure it, but there was no Linux on the
computer so I had no choice. When 14.04 came out a few months later I
did a dist-upgrade to it, and later to 16.04, and now to 18.04. This
latest one is the first time I've had any significant problem. And even
that is repairable, once I figure out how. (I think it's going to take
a grub reinstall, but that's scary so I'll wait until the Clinic on the
15th to do it.)

I don't know why I wrote all that, because I know you don't believe me.
Well, we'll just have to agree to disagree.