So, to work with file systems, they need to be mounted.
And even if nowadays there are system demounts, ETCFSSTEP is still the standard.
So let's discuss what is going on in this important configuration file.
So ETCFSSTEP is used to automate mounts.
In current Linux, it's used as an input file for the FSSTEP generator.
And that is a systemd component that generates the system demounts.
We talked about it in an earlier lesson.
In ETCFSSTEP, six columns are used to automate mounts.
The first column has the name of the device, or the UUID or label, if you want to mount
by UUID or label.
Then there is the mount point, followed by the file system type.
Next there are the mount options.
And column five and six are for the dump option and the FSCHEC option.
The dump option enables or disables support for the legacy dump utility.
As it is a legacy utility, not many people are using it anymore, and in many cases you
will find zero.
FSCHEC is determining the order for a file system check.
File system check is also something that belongs to older file systems.
Basically, EXE2, EXE3 were using it.
Now what was the idea?
Well, if your server crashed and it came up again, then file systems were checked.
And the FSCHEC option would be used to determine the order of checking.
Zero means no checking.
One means check this first.
Two means check this after the file system that has been marked with a one.
In current FSSTEP configurations, you will find zero, zero in most cases for dump and
FSCHEC.
Let's explore the contents of this configuration file.
So here we have the ETCFS app, and we already worked with it, so it can be quite fast.
Maybe this one is interesting.
So we are mounting a UUID.
I'll tell you later more about UUIDs and labels, but UUIDs and labels will never change, even
if your device name may change.
And for that reason, mounting by UUID or by label is standard.
Now we have the directory on which you want to mount the file system.
And here we have a couple of mount options.
Many options can be provided while mounting.
Here we can see a UMASK and a short name, but other popular options, for instance, are
no exec, which means that you cannot run any executable files, or no fill, which means
that if the file system cannot be mounted while booting, your boot procedure won't fill
because of that.
You put all of these options in the fourth column and feel free to replace defaults with
any option that you would like to use.
After tweaking your ETCFS step, I would always advise to use mount minus A. Mount minus A
is going to mount everything that hasn't been mounted yet.
And even stronger, if you reboot, you can immediately verify if everything works out
all right.
In real life, I would always advise you to reboot after making changes to ETCFS step
just to make sure that you didn't make any critical errors, which make that your system
may not be able to boot anymore.