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I've always found it confusing on where to mount permanent non-standard filesystems in Linux. Such as a filesystem that contains company files which is shared out via Samba or NFS.

It's not something that the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard has really tackled that I have found. The latest version of the spec 2.3 adds /srv but at this point it doesn't look like many distro's have started defaulting to using this directory for services data. Traditionally most distro's have defaulted to /var for this so I'm not sure administrators will adopt that convention.

Out of habit I tend to mount these non-standard filesystems under /mnt but FHS states that this should be used for temporary mount points. But I've also seen administrators put additional mount points in /, in /home, in /var, and in /usr/local.

So I'm curious to what the consensus is here on where these filesystems should be mounted.

  • What have you found has worked for you and your organization?
  • Are there any published best-practices that cover this subject?
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My feeling would be to not use /mnt or /home. Anything else is up to you. /srv sounds like it could work. –  user3914 Jun 21 '10 at 21:41

3 Answers 3

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Wherever it makes sense.

The FHS is great for maintaining consistency across distributions, whereas you have specific exceptions that need to be handled.

If it's a couple machines, mount them where it makes sense. If it's many, create your own policy for your company and document it (standards are great, everybody should have one).

For example, we:

  • mount Domino data under /var/dominodata and /var/dominolog
  • mount Oracle under /1, /2, /3 (okay, this is the client, not us)
  • oh, Squid needs more space? Mount a new FS under /var/spool/squid
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On Ubuntu, it is common to mount disks in /media though it is usually prefered for removable disks, I think it can fit well for permanent mount point.

A good point to use /media on ubuntu is if you are using some Desktop environment, it usually appears in the file manager (e.g. it appears in the Places menu in Gnome, and in Nautilus as well.)

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Yeah I'm more concerned with the permanent mount points for a server use. Something coming from DAS raid or SAN. –  3dinfluence Jun 21 '10 at 21:49

If something normally uses /var (apache, mysql etc.) then I'm happy to let it, moving those kinds of things just causes confusion. In other cases I'll use /srv.

IMO, /home should be reserved for actual users and /usr should not be used for variable data

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