[lsb-discuss] FHS Compliance for NFS Mounts

[Mike Seda]

On 04/27/2011 12:23 PM, Wichmann, Mats D wrote:
> lsb-discuss-bounces at lists.linux-foundation.org wrote:
>> Hi All,
>> Here's another OCD question... Where is the best place to mount NFS
>> exports while maintaining FHS compliance?
>>
>> I found this article, which seems to offer a nice solution, but just
>> wanted to check with others to see what their take was:
>> http://blog.loftninjas.org/2008/04/03/fhs-compliance-for-nfs-mounts
> of the choices presented there, /opt is definitely not right, it's
> intended for (non-distro-packaged) app installations.

Right. Using /opt for mount-points is definitely wrong. The choice that 
I was referring to earlier was /srv/nfs.

> beyond that, "it depends".  for example, nfs-served automounted
> home directories ought to appear where they belong, whether or not
> nfs is involved, so I want to see /home/mats whether that comes
> from local storage or from nfs.  A number of other things I
> can think of as being "typical" nfs resources are the same story -
> like things under /usr/share could well come from just one server
> via nfs, rather than being replicated everywhere.

Right. The "it depends" philosophy is definitely true, and I definitely 
agree that certain things should appear in the standard locations, e.g. 
/home.

> in the absence of guidance I bet the rest is open to some
> interpretation.  does this need to be solved in FHS?

Well, I guess I was just looking to FHS for some direction. I was just 
hoping that I could get some best practice approaches from it.

> My own
> completely personal interpretation is I'd use /srv for services
> provided by this machine, so web pages, ftp store, etc; rather
> than things served up by other machines.  But that's just one opinion.

Yep. Makes sense.

> "mnt is the old school way, but FHS uses the key word 'temporary'" -
> well, I think in many senses, an NFS mount /is/ temporary, it may
> in fact be implemented by a hard mount from fstab which makes it
> almost as permanent as a local mount (almost because the server
> could be unavailable sometimes while the local machine is not),
> but more often I expect automouting on-demand behavior and that
> seems to fit the criteria of temporary.

The word "temporary" is definitely what caused some confusion for me, 
and probably others, as well. I guess the takehome for me is that it's 
all about how the sysadmin interprets the FHS... Kind of like how a 
Supreme Court Justice interprets the constitution or something. :-)