/mnt folder question

[JonathanLee]

Hello fellow Netgate community members can you please help?

What is normally listed in the /mnt folder?

I am using the as a location to mount a drive however I stated to question of many packages or something else uses this ever and if I am using it maybe it could cause issues

[Gertjan]

@JonathanLee said in /mnt folder question:

What is normally listed in the /mnt folder?

Nothing.
IMHO, pfSense never uses this folder. I exists because it exists in the default FreeBSD file paths and folder, like any UNIX, Linux and other BSD based OS.
Its not used by pfSense, as pfSense users 'normally' don't mount drives (partitions) on their firewall.
It can be done of course, for whatever your reason is.

There are no packages that state that to use them, you need to mount an external drive.
Again, I never saw such a setup.

[stephenw10]

I would still use a custom location to be sure. I can't find anything off hand but if would conflict with anything that did.

I'm pretty sure the efi partition is mounted there to test at upgrade for example.

[JonathanLee]

@stephenw10 what if I use a folder inside that folder leaving the original location still useable

[stephenw10]

No I don't think that will work if the parent folder is then a mount point for something else. Though I'm not sure I've ever tried it.

Why not use something otherwise unused like maybe: /root/mnt or /root/logdrive etc

[JonathanLee]

@stephenw10 Thanks for the information I changed it to /nvme/LOGS_Optane per recommendations.

[patient0]

what if I use a folder inside that folder leaving the original location still useable

@JonathanLee just to clear to up: that won't work. If you mount yours on /mnt/very/important and pfSense mounts something into /mnt/ your content in subdirectories is not accessable anymore as long as there is something mounted into /mnt. After /mnt is unmounted it's accessable again.

What you are doing now, mounting into /nvme is a much better idea.

[JonathanLee]

@stephenw10 @patient0

Updated my unofficial guide if anyone else wants to try this

https://forum.netgate.com/topic/195843/unofficial-guide-have-package-logs-record-to-a-secondary-ssd-drive-snort-syslog-squid-and-or-squid-cache-system

[Gertjan]

@patient0 said in /mnt folder question:

that won't work. If you mount yours on /mnt/very/important and pfSense mounts something into /mnt/

But who would 'take over' /mnt/ ? pfSense ?
Normally (IMHO), a sub folder in /mnt/ is created, and that sub folder would get mounted.

Example : I've a USB drive named A , and mount in /mnt/, it would be accessible like this / mnt/drive-A/*
Mounting a second drive B would be called /mnt/Drive-B/
If mounted in /mnt/ then yeah, that would be what I call a huge error : bug ...

[patient0]

@Gertjan a bit further up stephenw10 wrote:

I'm pretty sure the efi partition is mounted there to test at upgrade for example.

... that's why.

[Gertjan]

@patient0 said in /mnt folder question:

@Gertjan a bit further up stephenw10 wrote:

I'm pretty sure the efi partition is mounted there to test at upgrade for example.

... that's why.

That's why I replied ... it wouldn't mount in /mnt but somewhere in /mnt/somewhere/
That is, that is what I hope.
Because, if not .... dono, that feels pretty dirty to me.
What if I have a USB drive mounted (also) with my config.xml ?
Anyway, just thinking out loud here.