Bug 190962

Summary: /etc/mtab needs to be a symlink to /proc/mounts
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Russell Coker <russell>
Component: setupAssignee: Phil Knirsch <pknirsch>
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG QA Contact: David Lawrence <dkl>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: rawhideCC: rvokal
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Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Last Closed: 2007-03-09 09:14:14 UTC Type: ---
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Russell Coker 2006-05-07 13:37:24 UTC 
Description of problem:
Use of the pam_namespace.so module can result in significant differences 
between the /etc/mtab file reports and the state of the name-space posessed by 
a user's session.  If the administrator mounts or umounts a file system after 
a user has logged in then /etc/mtab will be immediately updated but the actual 
mount list that applies to the user will not change.  This means that "df" 
will produce incorrect and misleading answers.

If /etc/mtab is made a symlink to /proc/mounts then the "df" command (and 
other programs that use /etc/mtab) will get the correct data that refers to 
the session in question.

Also please note that pam_namespace.so provides greater benefits to non-SE 
Linux users than it does to SE Linux users.
Comment 1 Florian La Roche 2007-03-09 09:14:14 UTC 
/etc/mtab and /proc/mounts don't contain identical data and different apps
work with them, so I don't think we can just merge them.

regards,

Florian La Roche