[Solved] I have an error in my /etc/fstab file, now I cannot get my rig to boot

[pirateghost]

Dude, we don't care what's in YOUR fstab, we want to know what's busted in HIS.

I know.

I thought it was weird. Jesus...

 

[pizzaazzip]

Code:

//nameOfOtherNAS/Folder /media/nameOfFreeNASDirectory smbfs guest,rw,-n-Iip.address 0 0

Is the contents of the fstab file. It previously was functional with

Code:

//user@nameOfOtherNAS/Folder /media/nameOfFreeNASDirectory smbfs rw,-n-Iip.address 0 0

but I still had to enter the password.

 

[pizzaazzip]

Hmm. Most Youtube doesn't make it very easily thru the UTM here. But I guess the question is, what's the contents of /etc/fstab, and what's actually mounted. I'm not actually that familiar with FreeBSD systems booting from ZFS and where the magic happens in the boot sequence for a ZFS filesystem to mount. So, two things, show us the contents of /etc/fstab

Code:

# cat /etc/fstab

and then also

Code:

# df /

In theory you can twiddle a fs back and forth between rw and ro.

Code:

# df /
Filesystem                                        1K-blocks    Used    Avail Capacity  Mounted on
freenas-boot/ROOT/FreeNAS-9.3-STABLE-201506292332  29232715 1043211 28189503     4%    /
# mount -u -o ro freenas-boot/ROOT/FreeNAS-9.3-STABLE-201506292332 /
# mount -u -o rw freenas-boot/ROOT/FreeNAS-9.3-STABLE-201506292332 /
#

But I don't really know how that interacts with a broken /etc/fstab offhand.

Unfortunately that did not work. I'm currently exploring other options.

 

[pizzaazzip]

I give up. I was hoping to learn something about ZFS by maybe trying to mount this on a different machine but everything is either super buggy, super out of date, or not easy for me to understand. Time to reinstall and reconfigure.

 

[jgreco]

Sorry to hear that. Without at least seeing what's gone awry in fstab, it is hard to know how to poke at things to see what might help you.

 

[anodos]

Perhaps a better way of persistently mounting a samba share is to create an init script that uses the "mount_smbfs" command to mount the samba share. It will then be part of your freenas config file (in case you have USB failure, or an upgrade changes /etc/fstab for some reason) and less likely to screw up your server.

 

[jgreco]

As long as there's no dependencies that would be a problem, yes, that's definitely a better way to go.

 

[pizzaazzip]

You know, I was thinking about this after wiped and started over
, https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/mount-samba-smb-cifs-persistently-through-fstab.27331/ this is the tutuorial I followed to Mount shares, it never mentions /etc/fstab it has another file path which I used when I messed things up. I wonder if /etc/fstab is generated and that is why I wasn't able to fix the issue. I was editing /etc/fstab last night and every time my freenas box was rebooted, my changes were gone.

 

[jgreco]

Oh, and, I demoted that thread out of the how-to area. It's just a train wreck of an idea.

 

[pizzaazzip]

Oh, and, I demoted that thread out of the how-to area. It's just a train wreck of an idea.

Well, it works just fine, it just needs a huge disclaimer with something on the lines of "if you have a typo, your machine won't boot, backup config before messing with it!" But if someone were to figure out a script that could run on boot, I would much prefer that too.

 

[pizzaazzip]

So I made a backup of my config after I messed with my /conf/base/etc/fstab again and when I updated today, I guess I had another error in it. Turns out, if I would have typed in nano /conf/base/etc/fstab instead of nano /etc/fstab I would have been able to boot. Lesson learned.