How to Automatically Mount File Systems and Storage Devices on Server Boot

Hey Tech Geeks, welcome to the AWS series in this series we are going to discuss AWS Cloud Services along with hands-on demos.

In this article, we are going to discuss about “Step-by-Step Guide to Auto-Mount File Systems at Server Startup”. Let’s discuss this way, why we should Ensure File Systems Auto-Mount During Server Startup? What if you have filesystems that are mounted to specific mount paths in the server but they are not stored in the /etc/fstab file.

If we can take one scenario that you have scheduled OS patching activity and you have performed patching activity like installing all available updates and checked if there are any reboot required patches and noticed few kernel patches requires reboot, obviously what you do reboot or restart the server right? yes you have done that and after that you reported to your team as patching activity done to proceed for further activities. The other team member reached out you saying that the files stored in the non-root block device are missing which we have earlier(before patching activity) in the specified mount path.

Note: By default root device filesystem mount details will store in the /etc/fstab by AWS

To avoid the scenario we should make sure the all filesystems and block storage devices mount details are updated in the /etc/fstab file, this file will execute at system boot time so that all the filesystems and block storage devices mounts stored in this file will automatically remount.

Let’s start demo

• Go to the EC2 service in the console

• Choose "Volumes" in the menu

• Click on create volume

• You will get this page

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  Configure Size, IOPS etc.., and make sure the availability zone of the server and volume are same

• Scroll down add tags and click on create volume

• Go back volumes and select the volume which we created earlier

• Click on actions, select attach volume

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  Choose Instance Id which we want to attach and Device name

• The device name recommended for non-root devices is /dev/sd[f-p], in the server it would be xvdf

• click on attach volume

• Connect to the server which we attached the earlier created volume

• run lsblk command to list all attached volumes to this server

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  We can see that the volume is not at mounted to any mount path

• Let’s format this volume to xfs filesystem type

• Run mkfs -t <file-system-type> <device name>

  

  • Create a directory for the mount path

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    Let’s mount the EBS block device to /mnt/scripts

  • Run mount /dev/xvdf /mnt/scripts

  • Run df -h to verify

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    Let create a test file to store data

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    If we restart or reboot the server now and do the df -h our mount will not show as we are not yet added this device mount details in /etc/fstab file.

  • Let me reboot and verify

  • 

    As you can see here our test file is not showing to recover from this, we need to remount our device to the mount path manually which we have earlier

  • Run mount /dev/xvdf /mnt/scripts

  • 

    Let’s add this device mount details in the /etc/fstab file

  • Run blkid to get UUID of the EBS volume

  • Run vi /etc/fstab and add block device mount details in the file

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    Here UUID : is the unique identifier of the device

  • /mnt/scripts : mounting point

  • xfs : file system type

  • defaults : refers to standard mount options

  • nofail : Usually if we get errors while mounting system will go emergency mode. nofail option ensures that boot process continue, even issue occurs while mounting

  • 0 : refers to disable dump utility

  • 2 : refers to fsck (file system check) utility

  • Now let’s reboot this time our mount will be there as we updated it on the /etc/fstab file

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    In this way, we can store our mount details in the /etc/fstab file to ensure that all mounts are in place as they were before the reboot.

Thanks for reading….Feedback is appreciated!!