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We have a (small) lan of linux boxes running cross mounted directories where in each host has the others mounted as hostname:/ on /hostname.

So for completeness, each machine could also have itself done-up as /machine -> /

What, if anything, is the pitfall of doing this?

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Are you NFS mounting? Hard or soft mounts? – Darren Hall Dec 10 '09 at 0:32
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Doing a symlink for the local machine should be fine, and should help any scripts that need machine-specific located files. You might also create a /self to have a generic name that always points to whatever is the machine you are on.

I hope you are using soft mounts or something similar so that one broken machine doesn't kill all the others.

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If you want "the current machine", just use /. That's available without any tricks... – Peter Cordes Dec 10 '09 at 2:53
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Yes, but once you are rolling scripts with a naming scheme of /<machine>/path/to/file, you often need to have the extended name in the path, even when pointing to the local maching. – Shannon Nelson Dec 11 '09 at 1:06
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Don't put the mounts in /, put them in /net. (in fact, install autofs, and enable /etc/auto.net in /etc/auto.master.)

If anything does a readdir of /, and ends up accessing an NFS mount, it will be slower. I don't think anything actually should ever do that (acess /* when they're trying to find out something about /home/user/foo), but keeping the NFS mounts in /net is the traditional place.

Yeah, you definitely want autofs.

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Probably bash tab-completion on /someth[ing] will stat things to see what's a directory and what's not. So yeah, always put potentially-broken mount points tucked away somewhere. – Peter Cordes Dec 10 '09 at 19:54
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