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[Juhan Leemet <1313513@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

IMO it is not enough to say "obsolete documentation, someone should
remove it". Some of us have been using *nix for years (or decades), and
some of these facilities have been developed and stabilized years ago.
We rely on things that used to work to keep working. At the very least,
one should revise old documentation to clarify that some older method
has been "deprecated" (as in java documentation), and the new method
should be referenced, together with conversion methods and/or tools. We
want to build on previous work. We don't want all of our sand castles to
fall down.

In my case, I also find that _netdev does not work on a recent
installation of Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS (upgraded to .3) on Lenovo D20 (dual
Xeon), but mysteriously it DOES work on a 1 y.o. installation (upgraded
to 14.04.3 LTS) on HP 500-189 (AMD A10). That suggests to me that there
must be some interaction(s) between packages? My old installation has
everything (including the kitchen sink), but my new installation is
rather spare (tho not exactly minimum). What is annoying is I want/need
to NFS mount my /home directories on my new install as well. I will try
autofs (waits longer, delaying during remainder of boot, until I try to
login) instead of hard NFS mount during boot sequence. Still, it is
annoying when things that used to work suddenly stop working.

-- 
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Touch seeded packages, which is subscribed to mountall in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1313513

Title:
  mountall does not honour _netdev

Status in mountall package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Hi,

  This is a fresh install of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS AMD64.  I tried
  configuring a Ceph Rados Block Device (rbd) to be mounted during boot
  on /var/lib/one, containing my OpenNebula configuration and database.

  The idea being that should the machine go belly up, I'll have an up-
  to-date snapshot of the OpenNebula data on Ceph to mount on the new
  frontend machine.

  /etc/ceph/rbdmap is configured, I set up /etc/fstab with an entry:

  /dev/rbd/pool/rbdname /var/lib/one xfs defaults,_netdev 0 1

  then rebooted.  According to mount(8), _netdev is supposed to tell
  mountall to skip mounting this device until the network is up.

  As seen from the attached snapshot, it doesn't bother to wait, and
  blindly tries to mount the RBD before connecting to Ceph: this will
  never work.

  mountall seems to rely on *knowing* a list of network file systems:
  this means when someone comes up with a new network file system, or
  uses a conventional disk file system with a remote block device,
  mountall's heuristic falls flat on its face as has been demonstrated
  here.  The problem would also exist for iSCSI, AoE, FibreChannel, nbd
  and drbd devices.

  Due to bug 1313497, the keyboard is non-functional.  Recovery is
  useless as the keyboard is broken there too, and now the machine is
  waiting for a keypress it will never see due to that bug.  A headless
  system would similarly have this problem.

  Two suggestions I would have:
  1. mountall should honour _netdev to decide whether to mount a device or not: this gives the user the means to manually tell mountall that the device needs network access to operate even if the filesystem looks to be local.  I'd wager that if the user specified _netdev, they probably meant it and likely know better than mountall.
  2. mountall should time out after a predefined period and NEVER wait indefinitely: even if the disk is local.  If a disk goes missing, then it is better the machine tries to boot in its degraded state so it can be remotely managed and raise an alarm, than to wait for someone to notice the machine being down.

  Unfortunately since the machine is now effectively bricked, I can only
  grep proxy server logs to see what packages got installed.
  mountall_2.53_amd64.deb seems to be the culprit.

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