Partitioning for a new system -- Third level mount point?

[Polytropon]

On Fri, 04 Sep 2015 17:34:36 -0700, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
> I'm setiing up a new system to run FreeBSD 10.2, and in the process
> of doing a ``manual'' initial partitioning of the main drive for
> this new system, I attempted to create a partition for which I
> specified a mount point of:
> 
> 	/var/ftp/private
> 
> (I want this to be a partition, all of its own, so that the actual
> maximum disk space for it will be hard-limited.)

And you can also specify the "noexec" mount option to
increase security. :-)



> Anyway, I was shocked to see... after doing the create step... that
> this new partition is listed in the partitions list as having a mount
> point of just:
> 
> 	/var/ftp
> 
> which is definitely not what I wanted.

Maybe this happened because the desired mountpoint /var/ftp/private
didn't exist yet, so /var/ftp was being used?

However, if you create /var/ftp/private and then edit the entry
in /etc/fstab for that partition, things should work as inteded.



> Did I do something wrong, or is the install-time ``manual'' partitioning
> tool actually limiting the number of pathname components for the mount
> points to just two?

That would sound stupid, wouldn't it? It's rather imaginable that
the case of "existing mount point fallback" is to be assumed, as
explained above.



> If so, isn't that a bit... um... arbitrary?

At least an error message should have been issued. A "silent
fallback" which "guesses" what the user might have wanted usually
is not a good idea (even though it's often seen "fashionable"
to do so today).



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...