Arch Linux

Markus.N2

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2013-08-22

Posts: 99

Can I suppress "A start job is running" for "nofail" fstab entries ?

Hi,

I have two fstab entries for my external USB disks. I think, I need the entries, because I want to have specific mount points, other than /run/media/$user/$disklabel ...
Most time, the disks are not connected, especially when the PC boots. That's why I added the "nofail" mount option for those fstab entries. In the beginning (I am using Arch Linux since about half a year), everything worked fine this way.

But since a few weeks, I always get the "A start job is running for $mountpoint" message during boot. The problem is that the boot process waits for those jobs to finish or fail.

Is there a way to make booting as fast as it was before ?

I do not insist on keeping the fstab entries as long as I can specify the mount points.
And I would not care about the start jobs if they would not make the boot process so much longer.
But I do not like to change the "nofail" to "noauto", because I want them to be automatically mounted when they are connected.

If it matters, I am using XFCE.

Thanks and Regards,
Markus

falconindy

Developer

From: New York, USA

Registered: 2009-10-22

Posts: 4,111

Website

Re: Can I suppress "A start job is running" for "nofail" fstab entries ?

add noauto,x-systemd.automount to your nofail entries.

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blog | ±github

Markus.N2

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2013-08-22

Posts: 99

Re: Can I suppress "A start job is running" for "nofail" fstab entries ?

Thanks for the tip.

It works, but it breaks some of my scripts:

mount

now shows

systemd-1 on $mountpoint type autofs (rw, ... )

for all of my fstab entries with this option.
systemd being pseudo-mounted on the mountpoints has the side effect that any access to that directory hangs when there is nothing mounted.
So every script that tries to access files (even existence check if [ -f ... ]) under a mount point needs to check if it's mounted first. This adds a dependency to the scripts: they must know (or figure out) all mount points and check every path against them.

Also, bash auto-completion in the parent directory of the mout points hangs.

Edit:
I just found another problem: It automounts only once per mountpoint. If you umount and disconnect the disk and then re-connect it later, it does not mount any more.

Last edited by Markus.N2 (2014-07-04 20:13:33)

smoothdad

Member

From: Santa Monica, California

Registered: 2013-08-25

Posts: 2

Re: Can I suppress "A start job is running" for "nofail" fstab entries ?

I was having the same nofail issue.  I just updated systemd to 215-4, and this appears to be fixed now.

dave.computer

Member

Registered: 2012-10-23

Posts: 15

Re: Can I suppress "A start job is running" for "nofail" fstab entries ?

Updating systemd to 215-4 solved the problem for me as well.