mounting solaris

Mounting the new filesystem

Following the letter of the law now you should fsck your new filesystem prior to mounting it – feel free. What you really want to do however is mount it so that you check it out. You can actually mount a filesystem on ANY directory, though it ought to be an empty one. There is an empty directory just for this purpose – /mnt;

    sun# mount /dev/dsk/c0t1d0s5 /mnt
    sun# df -k /mnt
    Filesystem            kbytes    used    avail capacity  Mounted on
    /dev/dsk/c0t1d0s5    2100583      10  2100573     0%    /mnt
    sun# ls -l /mnt
    total 62
    drwxrwxrwx   4 root     root         512 Jan  2  1999 lost+found 
    sun# umount /mnt

Here we are using /mnt as a mount point. More about these in The Filesystem explained – Mount Points

When you are content umount the filesystem with ‘umount /mnt’. Now you need to make things permanent – /etc/vfstab.

Swap Partitions – a.k.a. Swap Device

Solaris uses multiple swap partitions in parallel and shifting some of the paging load off the main system disk can make a big difference. By convention swap partitions should be placed on partition #1. This is however only a convention – nothing relies on it.

Once you have a partition free and available, you activate it by using the ‘swap -a’ command.

Be very careful here if you get this wrong and specify a partition that has a filesystem on it, well it won’t after this command !

Assuming you have adhered to the convention and defined partition #1 as the swap area then for our example disk the command would be;

     sun (ksh) # swap -a /dev/dsk/c0t1d0s1
     sun (ksh) #

In classic Unix style swap remains silent if all is well. You can confirm your swap partition is now live with swap -l;

      sun (ksh)# swap -l
      swapfile             dev  swaplo blocks   free
      /dev/dsk/c0t3d0s1   32,25      8 205624 165408
      /dev/dsk/c0t1d0s1   32,9       8 236992 236992

You now need to add it to vfstab.

/etc/vfstab

We are going to make our new filesystem available under a new directory called /data. This doesn’t exist yet so we create it with ‘mkdir /data’. After editing /etc/vfstab the new entry looks like this;

/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s5 /dev/rdsk/c0t1d0s5 /data   ufs  3  yes     -

The seven fields of vfstab are;

1. Block device – used for ‘mount’, and ‘swap’
2. Character (raw) device – used by fsck. (for swap partitions this should be «-«)
3. Mount point for the file system (for swap partitions ths should be «-«)
4. Filesystem type. ‘ufs’ for a filesystem, ‘swap’ for a swap partition.
5. fsck pass number. See below
6. mount at boot time ? YES|NO
7. mount options. See the manual pages for mount(1m) and mount_ufs(1m) for a full list.

After saving it, you should be able to do a ‘mount -a’ and have your new filesystem mounted under /data.. You’ll likely see some warnings about other filesystems already being mounted – these can be safely ignored