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Unix starts at root, which is how nature intended. It does not change characteristics based on media - you can mount a floppy at root if you want. Why get ups

by gerdesj 11mo ago

Unix starts at root, which is how nature intended. It does not change characteristics based on media - you can mount a floppy at root if you want. Why get upset over /media vs /mnt? You do you, I know I do. For example The Step CA docs encourage using /etc/step-ca/ (https://smallstep.com/docs/step-ca/certificate-authority-server-production/#running-step-ca-as-a-daemon https://smallstep.com/docs/step-ca/certificate-authority-ser...) for configuration for their product. Normally I would agree but as I am manually installing this thing myself and not following any of the usual docs, I've gone for /srv/step-ca. I think we get enough direction from the ... "standards" ... for Unix file system layouts that any reasonably incompetent admin can find out which one is being mildly abused today and get a job done. On Windows ... good luck. I've been a sysadmin for both platforms for roughly 30 years and Windows is even odder than Unix.

Wowfunhappy 11mo ago
> Unix starts at root, which is how nature intended. It does not change characteristics based on media - you can mount a floppy at root if you want. Why is the root of one of my drives `/` while the roots of my other drives are subdirectories of that first drive?
- TimeBearingDown 11mo ago
  Only the root of the root filesystem is / The point is that any filesystem can be chosen as the OS’s root. The root of all other filesystems - there could be multiple per drive - is where you tell the filesystem to be mounted, or in your automounter’s special directory, usually /run/media, where it makes a unique serial or device path. * clarity
- eichin 11mo ago
  Thinking of it in terms of namespaces might help; it's not that the drive is special, it's that there's a view that starts from / and one disk filesystem happens to be dropped there and others are dropped elsewhere; with something like initramfs there aren't any drives on /, just a chunk of ram, though you usually pivot to a physical one later (many linux-based embedded systems don't because your one "drive" is an SD card that can't handle real use, so you just keep the "skeleton" in memory and drop various bits of eMMC or SD or whatever into the tree as-convenient.)
  - Wowfunhappy 11mo ago
    I do get it, I just don't think that the UNIX way is necessarily more natural than the Windows way.
- Dylan16807 11mo ago
  In multiple ways, / doesn't have to be one of your drives.
- Hendrikto 11mo ago
  Because you (or your distro) configured it like that. You don’t have to do it that way.
- 1718627440 11mo ago
  It's not, it's a shared namespace. It just happens that one of your drives is mounted at / and the others are not.
- yencabulator 11mo ago
  You can make / be none of your drives, if that's what you wish. Just have a tmpfs and mount things into it. The mechanism is generic and pretty. The specifics of how it's often used are legacy-driven. Nothing in unix really depends on the specifics.

by gerdesj 11mo ago

Wowfunhappy 11mo ago

> Unix starts at root, which is how nature intended. It does not change characteristics based on media - you can mount a floppy at root if you want. Why is the root of one of my drives `/` while the roots of my other drives are subdirectories of that first drive?

TimeBearingDown 11mo ago
Only the root of the root filesystem is / The point is that any filesystem can be chosen as the OS’s root. The root of all other filesystems - there could be multiple per drive - is where you tell the filesystem to be mounted, or in your automounter’s special directory, usually /run/media, where it makes a unique serial or device path. * clarity
eichin 11mo ago
Thinking of it in terms of namespaces might help; it's not that the drive is special, it's that there's a view that starts from / and one disk filesystem happens to be dropped there and others are dropped elsewhere; with something like initramfs there aren't any drives on /, just a chunk of ram, though you usually pivot to a physical one later (many linux-based embedded systems don't because your one "drive" is an SD card that can't handle real use, so you just keep the "skeleton" in memory and drop various bits of eMMC or SD or whatever into the tree as-convenient.)
- Wowfunhappy 11mo ago
  I do get it, I just don't think that the UNIX way is necessarily more natural than the Windows way.
Dylan16807 11mo ago
In multiple ways, / doesn't have to be one of your drives.
Hendrikto 11mo ago
Because you (or your distro) configured it like that. You don’t have to do it that way.
1718627440 11mo ago
It's not, it's a shared namespace. It just happens that one of your drives is mounted at / and the others are not.
yencabulator 11mo ago
You can make / be none of your drives, if that's what you wish. Just have a tmpfs and mount things into it. The mechanism is generic and pretty. The specifics of how it's often used are legacy-driven. Nothing in unix really depends on the specifics.