/media versus /mnt

[James Wilkinson]

James McKenzie wrote:
> I thought that FHS was addressing this 'descrepency' by adding /media 
> for media mount points, again leaving /mnt for those devices that 
> 'disconnect' such as tape drives

Um. I read it that a "temporary" mount is something like a once-off NFS
mount or loopback mount. And you'd mount it straight on /mnt.  And, as I
said, you *don't* want to mount a tape as such: it's not designed for
filesystems.

> (btw, who uses a tape drive on a small system these days?)

Anyone who *needs* good back-ups and doesn't have a networked backup
solution. Small businesses, in particular, should be backing up
important servers every night. And if the data doesn't fit on a single
DVD±RW, then tape is the best solution: it gets expensive having enough
hot-swappable removable hard drives.

> Anyway, adding this after years of /mnt can and does lead to confusion.  
Tell me about it...

> Of course you can always move the associated devices back over to /mnt 
> from /media.  Again, this can lead to other headaches.

Like it not being FHS-compliant: if you have /mnt/floppy, and something
expects to loopback mount on /mnt, then /mnt/floppy will be hidden.

James.
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