Re: RFC: configuration file for storing persistent FCoE information

[Bill Nottingham <notting redhat com>]

> That is useful, there is one problem with this though, it is a regular
> initscript, which means filesystems on fcoe devices cannot be mounted
> from rc.sysinit. We can work around this by marking them as _netdev
> in their fstab options (otherwise rc.sysinit will drop the system
> to a rescue shell when it cannot find them).
>
> There are however issues with marking them as _netdev:
> 1) This is technically not correct IMHO, FCoE is just a normal external
>    "disk", which happens to be plugged in in ethernet port instead of
>    a usb stick, but it has nothing to do with the network
>    (fibrechannel != network), see below as to why this matters

Well, it requires the link at least to be up, which we don't do until
network/NM.

> 2) If we do mark them as _netdev, they will not get mounted until the
>    "network" is up and running, which in our default setup using
>    NetworkManager, means that they will not get mounted until
>    NetworkManager has brought up an interface associated with the default
>    route. So if the dhcp server is down, we will not mount our FCoE
>    filesystems even if they are fine.

Right, but it's sort of weird to have local net filesystems and yet
be unable to have an address assigned to you - I'm not sure that's
the sort of case we need to optimize for.

> The alternative would be to add a /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit.d dir, and the ability
> to rc.sysinit to run scripts dropped in there before the fsck and mounting
> of fs. Bill, so how much do you hate this idea ?

It's been discussed before; the big issue is that there's not a
good universal place to order it within rc.sysinit that makes sense.

Bill