Sysadmin at work

For you sysadmin types out there, this is not such a big accomplishment, but for me it is. I salvaged a drive from one of my older systems that I was throwing out. I decided to add it to my Linux box because I wanted to separate my home directories from my OS files.

This particular drive was a 800M IDE drive that I slapped into the box and the machine booted right away. Now, I'm not a hardware guy, so the fact that this worked the first time was pretty amazing to me.

Next, I knew I had to partition the disk and cook a filesystem, but didn't know the Linux commands to do it. I went to the Red Hat docs and managed to partition my disk and cook an ext3 filesystem. On Solaris, I'd just put an entry in /etc/vfstab and mount the filesystem. But there's no vfstab file on Linux. I did some more reading and found I need to put my entry in /etc/fstab. Although the format of the fstab file is different then I'm used to, I put the entries in like I think they should have been and tried to mount. Still can't mount.

Finally, I realize that my new disk has to have a label. I go through the same process except put a label on the disk this time. I use the new syntax in the /etc/fstab file and finally the filesystem mounts. I reboot the box and the filesystem mounts automatically. Basically a two hour process for something my sysadmins could have done in about 5 minutes. The joy of learning.