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i want to have 2 partitions. one is called system. the other is private.

in the private partition i've got some folders i want to mount into system as system folders.

folders in private: - www - home

mount points in system: - /var/www - /home

is this possible? cause it seems that you can only specify a whole partition to use for a mount point and not a folder in a partition or am i wrong?

i run ubuntu server.

cheers

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On Linux, you can do this with bind mounts.

These commands:

mount --bind /private/www /var/www
mount --bind /private/home /home

Will do what you want. The fstab version of them is:

/private/www   /var/www  none  bind
/private/home  /home     none  bind
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  • ...the unspoken assumption being that you've previously mounted the private partition to /private ...right? – quack quixote Apr 7 '10 at 18:21
  • so i dont have to do this during installation? but what happens to the files in /var/www if i mount /private/www there instead? so goes with /home. cause maybe someone already created some users in /home. – ajsie Apr 7 '10 at 18:22
  • The files are still there, just hidden by the filesystem that is mounted on top. If you need access to them, consider adding links in, for example, /home to the directories in /private/home – KeithB Apr 7 '10 at 20:15
  • Yes same caveats of normal mounting still apply, the src has to exist (you can't mount /dev/md0 to / if you don't have /dev/md0), contents of the dst directory will be hidden. Did I answer you question? – kbyrd Apr 7 '10 at 20:54
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You need to mount the whole volume somewhere so that you can get access to the contents. Once you have done that you can do a bind mount to mount part of it somewhere else as well. See the mount(8) man page for details:

Bind mount operation

Remount part of the file hierarchy somewhere else. The call is:

    mount --bind olddir newdir

or by using this fstab entry:

    /olddir /newdir none bind

After this call the same contents are accessible in two places.

It is important to understand that "bind" does not create any second-class or special node in the kernel VFS. The "bind" is just another operation to attach a filesystem. There is nowhere stored information that the filesystem has been attached by a "bind" operation. The olddir and newdir are independent and the olddir may be unmounted.

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